Renegade Search

Here at Digital Third Coast, we take providing measurable value to our clients seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that it's the first thing listed on our Core Values. We recognize that one of the biggest challenges facing businesses is figuring out a way to evaluate if their SEO campaign is successful. Ultimately, the only factor that determines success is the bottom-line; like any investment, we do not think that our services are truly successful unless we can provide positive ROI.

At the same time, we recognize that SEO is a long-term investment, and it simply isn't possible to provide positive ROI right out of the gate. So with that in mind, we usually focus on three distinct indicators of SEO success:

Keyphrase Ranking Improvements
Non-Branded Organic Search Traffic
Conversions

At different stages of our campaigns, we tend to focus on these indicators to varying degrees. Because search engine rankings tend to improve relatively quickly to quality SEO, we can use rankings for individual keywords to measure our earliest efforts. Later on in the process, the additional data that trickles in over time allows us to evaluate success based on organic traffic and conversions.

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I tend to find that most Google Analytics users are primarily looking at how people reached their website and hoping that the traffic graphs get bigger over time. George wrote a great piece last month on setting up goals so that you can see what actions users performed once they reached your website - this is very important! This can show you the value of the traffic coming to your website and how well your marketing is working for your business. All the upward trending graphs and thousands of visitors don't mean much for reporting purposes if you don't know what actions those visitors took. Now the next step is figuring out how the users interacted with your website and one great way to understand both user action and user intent is through the Site Search reports.

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The old version of Google Analytics is lying when it comes to conversion data. Well, not really. But it has severe limitations. In navigating the new version of GA over the past several months, I have encountered several reports that are not available in the old version. Analyzing conversion data in the old version of analytics can be somewhat misleading. The old version of GA attributes a goal conversion to the last source that brought the visit to your site - it does not track whether or not the visitor accessed the site through multiple sources prior to converting.  Alternatively, the Assisted Conversions report in the new version of GA has been particularly useful in identifying the true origin of a site’s conversions.

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This post is meant to inspire people that aren't tracking goals on their site (or don't pay attention to them). If you're one of those people that says "well, i know that business is up, so I must be getting more traffic on my website" OR "business is down, so it must be because I'm getting less traffic on my website", this post is for you.

If you're going to do only one thing in your analytics implementation, YOU SHOULD TRACK GOALS.

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A very simple exercise that can benefit an organic or paid search campaign is the use of annotations within Google Analytics. As your website continues to develop, inevitable changes will occur - your traffic may increase or decrease, rankings in the SERPs may rise and fall, and in the end, determining the cause of such events is a quintessential piece of the puzzle. If you are able to identify sources of improvement, or in some cases regression, taking the necessary steps in creating the most efficient, well rounded internet marketing campaign possible becomes easier. Making improvements should always be a goal; the ever-changing nature of search engines forces us to constantly re-assess both time-proven and more recent, untested strategies that may help a website's performance. Knowing how to effectively utilize annotations can be quite helpful in that process.

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