Engage-Digital

Search engine optimisation is seen by many as the Holy Grail of online acquisition. If done properly it’s considered to be the cheapest and most effective way of driving high quality traffic to a web site. Many people obsess and probably loose sleep over their favourite search term(s) reaching the cherished number one spot in Google’s “organic” rankings. A tweak in Google’s algorithm can have a significant impact on some small and mid sized businesses. When Google sneezes others get the flu.

Understanding the impact of organic search is the first useful step to improving rankings and driving increased volume of organic traffic. All web analytics tools provide reports which show the top referring search terms and phrases but in most cases these reports will need some configuration before they become useful.

To begin with if a pay per click campaign is being run it’s normally necessary to split out paid for search traffic and organic search traffic. This is done in most cases by setting up the paid for search traffic as a campaign in your analytics tool. Most tools will then automatically do the rest of the work for you by splitting out the two sources of traffic and dumping them in separate reports.

From here it becomes possible to view which organic search terms and phrases drive the greatest volume of traffic, which are the best converters, which pages they drive traffic to and what the bounce rate is. Being able to directly compare organic and pay per click in this way helps highlight gains that can be cross pollinated between PPC and SEO.

Most sites have a few terms and phrases that drive the core of the organic traffic but they also have a longer tail of terms and phrases that when combined form a significant but often ignored source of high quality traffic. Exporting this data means that these little gems in the long tail can be wheedled out based on their high conversion rate and nurtured until they make a greater contribution to overall volume.

Other measurement tools such as Hittails and Advanced Web Ranking will help in identifying search terms to focus on and monitoring actual positioning in search engine rankings.

Finally, due to the long term nature of search engine optimisation patience and trended data are key to happiness and enlightenment. It’s unusual to move up the search engine rankings and drive more traffic to a site the day after making a few changes. Quite often it can take months to rise up or fall from grace.

This is an article I wrote for issue 176 of .net magazine in the UK.

I used to be Head of Online Planning and Buying at a London based media buying agency. I was there for 3 years between 1999 and 2002. In my first year our nascent online media planning and buying department experienced a 1000% growth in billings and some growing pains. Of course overall spend was much lower then than it is now as online media was also in its infancy relatively speaking.

Then in 2001 things slowed dramatically. At the time, growth in online media had been fed by new internet start ups with lots of VC capital looking to advertise to help grow their businesses and drive inexorably towards IPO! Additionally it was driven by a growth in interest from mainstream advertisers looking to dip a toe in and check the temperature.

Advertising is often considered a bellwether of economic decline as it’s one of the first things to be cut from budgets as belts tighten and when the slow down came in 2001 billings pretty much flat lined in our corner of the online media world, but other channels fared worse.

Part of the reason why online advertising may have fared better is due to much greater levels of accountability compared with other forms of advertising. Now consider the level of accountability we have with web analytics.

Back then in the early “naughties” web analytics was barely a twinkle in a webmaster’s eye, now it is proudly sitting at the boardroom table.

Not only can web analytics bring even greater accountability to on and offline advertising (if set up correctly) but it also completely opens up the level of business accountability for the website itself. It can be used to drive growth and cut costs through improved efficiencies across the whole spectrum of online communication.

If we are truly staring down the barrel of worsening economic conditions, especially looking forward into 2009 then arguably the worst thing any organisation could do would be to cut its web analytics budget.

Back in January I was working with a client that operates in an industry that is itself suffering but the saving grace for this particular client was their new website which had proved a great success in the face of a generally poorer trading climate.

If economic conditions deteriorate web analytics and the insight that it provides should be safeguarded and pored over with even greater intensity in the same way that normal business reporting and results are.