Web Analytic Matt

The Online Search Trilogy
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on March 22nd, 2007

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This is a post for all the online marketing people out there who know about Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing but are a little bit hazy when it comes to how it all fits in with Web Analytics.

To demonstrate one example of how these three parts of the online search story can work with each other I have drawn the diagram below.

How Does It Work?
This trilogy starts with a website. Lets say you have a lead generation website about your carpet cleaning services.

As an online marketer, when building and populating the website with content you would create fully SEO’d copy that would be nicely indexed in the major search engines and hopefully get you a nice pile of visitors that need their carpets cleaned.

Now it is common knowledge that the easiest way of getting traffic to your website is to buy advertising space. Particularly good advertising space can be found at the side of search engine results pages (SERPs) as these will be associated to the search term made by the user of the search engine. Your SEO’d content pages should make reasonably good landing pages for your adverts as long as your marketing message is coherent between the advert and the landing page.

Once you have some visitor traffic to your website you can analyse it in your web analytics application. Things that you may wish to look for are:

• What are your visitors doing once they land on your website?
• Are your visitors converting into leads?
• Which organic keywords are visitors that convert using?
• Which organic keywords are causing visitors to bounce straight off your website?
• How can you shorten the path from your landing page to a conversion page?
• How can you introduce opportunities to convert visitors along the most popular visitor paths from your landing page?

All these questions and more can be asked of your analytics in order to refine your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

Also you can find out what organic keywords cause people to convert, once this is known you can write more content using the good converting keywords. This means that your visitors with a higher conversion rate (targeted traffic) will reach your website via organic search methods. Once your organic content is attracting the right level of traffic you can reduce the PPC campaigns for those keywords and work on targeting other keywords.