I was surprised when one of my clients told me about his previous SEO company, where he had not received a single report or proof of ROI for a whole year. The only thing that he was shown was proof of ranking in Google. You can just imagine it; Look there you are, #1 on Google, when you search for London based used Saab car dealer that sells car parts lol ok maybe not that bad. My point being that there are SEOs that simply does SEO based on improving ranking; they dont care whether the keyword the client is ranking for will actually result in a conversion. Now this is not very clever SEO but it happens, and Ive even heard well known SEOs say that ranking high in the search engines equates to high traffic thus conversions. Now does it? Is it that simple? Really?
In my opinion doing proper Search Engine Optimisation is doing Analytic SEO, where you optimise to get conversions, not necessarily traffic. Now, obviously this depends of what kind of site you are optimising, and whether they have a definable conversion goal. But more often than not you have definable goal to work towards, an ultimate goal if you wish. A goal, which brings them on step closer to a sale, a subscription or even user interaction. So it makes sense to me that SEO should be done with this in mind. I personally would NEVER do SEO for anyone without doing Web Analytics, you wouldnt do PPC without carefully following the progress in your PPC account would you?
Picture this; your Web Analytics can be for organic results what the PPC Account is for paid for results. You can test your heading and ad performance (title & meta description tag), the CTR, conversion rate etc.. Doing SEO goes so much further than slamming in some keywords that gets you traffic, and a hundred links that helps you achieve the rankings for those keywords. It needs to be taken further to qualify as successful SEO. Its just naive, and dare I say a little stupid, to think that SEO stops with ranking #1. So get of your chair and start planning, make a proper SEO strategy where you carefully target keywords on each page, avoid keyword cannibalization, and please make sure you do optimise those title and meta description tags not only for ranking, but for improving CTR to your sit and ultimately the user experience.
Analytic SEO, is clever SEO.
Ok hit me with it, you know you want to…