SEO don’t just focus on keyword positions

Many people in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) obsess over keyword positions, in recent times this focus seems tired and shows that people are still unaware. Some top things to consider are covered below.

Tracking

There are so many options and solutions available to track site visitors and traffic sources. Google Analytics dominates the website analytical software and it is constantly being invested in to improve and add new features, the primary reason for its success is that it is free to use. The key areas to consider when defining what you should measure and track on your website are:

Traffic Sources

It is important to understand where your traffic is coming from, if you created a advert and placed it on a website, it is important for you to understand how many people have visited your website from this advert. The same applies for other marketing channels such as SEO, PPC, Affiliate campaigns, display advertisements.

Visitors

The visitors to your website are obviously important, so it is useful to understand them as much as possible. Consider the following questions:

• What countries are they coming from? You can even check what cities visitors come from. Understanding this information can be a very useful metric if you offer products or services to international customers
• How long do people stay on certain pages? What pages engage your audience more, maybe create more pages like this.

Conversions

Conversions don’t just have to be when someone purchases something on your website, it could be a number of things for example:

• When someone contacts you through your website or visits the contact page
• How frequently people visit the help section on your website
• When people signed up to your email marketing list
• Measure when people join your forums or any social community activity
  

By setting up conversions for your website you can trace back common paths of activity, allowing you to understand your site visitors trends and common routes to each conversion. Using this information empowers you to make changes to improve your site visitors experience.

Return on Investment - ROI

It can be very hard to measure ROI and the larger the organisation you work for the harder it becomes. ROI is a calculation used to understand:

• What was spent on a marketing activity
• How much revenue did it generate
• To compare how effective different marketing channels are side by side

ROI can be calculated on Gross Revenue or Profit, it’s often calculated on revenue because profit figures are often not so freely discussed.

Here is an example ROI calculation: ROI = [(Payback - Investment)/Investment)]*100

Traffic from long tail search terms

It’s very important to consider a number of metrics when reviewing a website and only focusing on keyword positions will not lead you to success.

There is another thing that makes quite a difference these days, a lot of a websites traffic will come from long tail search terms. It can be very hard to track all of these terms because often there are many long tail search phrases that generated only one or two visitors.

You can group the keywords to see which keyword categories are generating lots of visits to a website. This can be a time consuming task but if you spend time understanding what types of long tail phrases are working well to drive traffic to your website the information will be much more valuable than only focusing on the top handful of keywords you think are important.