There are more myths of Search Engine Optimisation than any other field of online marketing. Too many companies follow bad advice, act on incorrect assumptions and miss out on an abundance of Google-originated targeted traffic.
Once the optimisation of the website is complete, mistakes often continue, with an astonishing number of businesses and individuals incorrectly measuring the results of their labours.
The following is a list of factors to consider when trying to gauge the results of your optimisation efforts.
Realistic expectations:
Time – don’t expect newly optimised pages to start ranking in first place a few days after uploading the changes. Even though new content may be indexed relatively quickly, it can take weeks, months or even longer for the full impact of the changes to take place.
Moving target – Google change their ranking factors on an ongoing basis, and both you and your competition are constantly adding new content, adjusting and reoptimising your websites. The result is a constantly changing environment. Never forget that rankings may rise or fall as a result of changes made by your competition. You can’t always take the blame or credit for the results.
Data depth – traffic from Google drying-up or exploding tomorrow means nothing. Short-term fluctuations are meaningless, as are small data samples. Looking at a trend over the last two weeks is as pointless as celebrating a 200% surge when you only get 4 visitors a day from Google.
Quantity vs. quality:
Quantity of traffic is meaningless. You may start getting an additional 200 visitors a day from Google, but if they’re looking for something that you’re not selling, then nothing has been achieved.
Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.
If most Google-originated visitors are leaving within a few seconds of arriving, then you’re either attracting the wrong people or the page they’re landing on isn’t working correctly.
Keep an eye on bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site to get a feel for what’s working and what isn’t. But be careful – see below.
Don’t blend your data:
Food blenders are great for making sauces, soups and smoothies, but blend everything and you end up with baby food.
The same applies to your SEO data.
When analysing organic keyword performance, you might notice a reasonable number of visitors for a targeted keyword that has a high bounce rate. With a little Analytics kung fu you should be able to isolate the page/s where this is occuring and then address the issue accordingly.
It’s important to remember that the data in your Analytics account is by default for the website as a whole. So if KEYWORD 1 has a 50% bounce rate, that might be spread across a number of pages, some of which are performing well, while others perform poorly.
Making decisions on keyword bounce rates has to be based on individual pages.
Get funky with Analytics:
Google Analytics allows you to quickly and easily segment your organic traffic from the search engines, and using Advanced Filters will identify which keywords are producing more than 50 visitors a day with bounce rates below 50%, for example.
Judicious use of these features will allow you to recognise two important data streams:
– traffic that should perform well but doesn’t – requiring optimisation of the relevant pages for conversion (aka the visitor experience)
– targeted, worthwhile visitors from Google – ultimately the true measure of success for your SEO efforts.
Don’t get distracted by…
– Rankings for specific keywords. These can change with alarming regularity, and never forget that results will vary according to location, search history, user settings and more. Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.
– The number of backlinks. Yes it’s a factor to take into consideration, but ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.
– PageRank. If you’re still obsessing over this then there’s little I can do to help. Try to remember that it’s 2011. Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.
Notice a theme?
Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.
