Analyze This Analytics, PPC & SEO

November 27th, 2009 by admin

“Search is the world’s largest focus group.” A while ago, someone said this to me (I can’t remember who, but buy yourself an eclair if it’s you: you’ve earned it), and it struck me as pure brilliance. We tend to get so focused on the challenge of showing up in search results that we frequently forget that we’re bringing real people with real needs to our website, and unlike other traffic sources, these people have already told us exactly what they’re looking for. Searchers are an analyst’s dream because of this fact: in many cases, we know why they came to our site, and this helps us put their actions into some sort of context.

I decided to tap into my artistic side to illustrate a common problem in search marketing, but I have to forewarn you, this is my first comic, and I’m not much of an artist:

Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik has coined a phrase that goes something like this: “Bounce rate is when people get to your site, puke, and leave.” I love this, and I think we can build on it. For one thing, we have to ask ourselves if we’re setting ourselves up for this, well, puking. In many cases, it seems to me like we are.

SEO, in a vacuum

Search engine optimization is without a doubt one of the most effective forms of growing your audience for the average website. And it’s also incredibly complex, spanning technical issues, keyword research, keeping up with ever-changing search engines and a much much more that you can read about right here at Search Engine Land. And the goal of it? Gain rankings for key terms in the search engines.

The mostly correct assumption in most SEO campaigns I’ve seen is that by reaching the goal of higher rankings, traffic will follow. And with traffic, we get website activity. And with activity, conversions. And this is where it gets dangerous—when SEO turns into a trophy collection of rankings rather than an ROI-focused venture.

None of these assumptions are inherently wrong or bad. It’s the act of assuming that’s the problem. Web analytics offers us sufficient data to know which of these keywords are driving traffic to which landing pages, whether people stay, what they do, and whether they buy (or whatever your “conversion” is). This information should cause immediate action, but rarely does.

It seems like the big issue really boils down to the keyword research process. Most SEOs and their companies / clients will automatically focus on driving large volumes by optimizing their site for relevant keywords with the highest search frequency, when this really isn’t usually the best approach. While you may have significant volume, you can spend countless hours trying to figure out why Banana Republic doesn’t convert for the word “clothes” and never come up with an answer. But if you find out that users looking for “khaki pants” are landing on the home page and not converting, you can probably dig in and find out that there are no images of pants or links to khakis on that page. Head terms might captivate the imagination of the masses and deliver them to the site, but they’re hard to diagnose and understand, while mid- and tail terms provide more focused traffic that will help you optimize your site.

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