The New York Post recently published a story stating that online advertising would surpass traditional advertising in dollars spent by 2011, maybe sooner. And Search Marketing (SEO) is the fastest growing form of online advertising with new statistics showing most people start their web experience by searching for a product or service in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, or via directories, such as Yellowpages.com, CitySearch.com, or AreaConnect.com.
But assuming you are wise enough to already employ SEO in marketing your website, do you know what the visitors to your website are doing once they get there? You will be even better served by measuring to some degree all the traffic you are having sent to your site. What actions do visitors take once they come to your website? How many are coming and when? What is it costing to obtain a 'conversion' or 'contact'. You'll know the answers if you have statistical reporting software that provides you with metrics you can measure. Google analytics, Webalyzer, Omniture and Clicktracks are well known forms of of what is now commonly called 'web analytics' software.
Your web analytics or 'hit tracking' software as it was referred to 'back in the day' should provide you or your marketing director with actionable, real-time intelligence regarding your search marketing campaigns. Depending on your software, you should be able to quickly identify and understand how many visitors are going to each of your pages and how long they are staying, which terms visitors used to find your website and from which pages they exit.
The more advanced software allows you to do things like following your visitor's 'click path' through your website, analyze what the search engines see when they visit your website, display where your visitors are coming from via color-coding, show how much you spent to bring the visitor via PPC, show what’s driving critical success events, and display how different segments of visitors interact with your Web site.
Web analytics software provides the foundation for effective online business and marketing decisions through accurate measurement and analysis. If you don't have the time to manage your SEO / PPC campaign or measure the results of your campaigns, then consider letting a Professional Search Marketing Specialist ( SEO or SEM ) take care of this for you on a monthly basis.
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I have to agree with Mr. Waters. For a business venture I started 8 months ago, my partner and I built a website to compliment it with the intention of doing all our business online once it got off the ground. We offer a specialized service (communications) and at first had very few competitors and no immediate reason to utilize search engine marketing. Over time, however, the demand for the services we offer grew, and more and more competitor sites started popping up, resulting in decreased traffic to our site. We then decided to integrate a PPC and SEO campaign to see how we could increase visitor traffic and glean some knowledge regarding our clients' search habits, the number of unique visitors, etc. Utilizing these tactics gave us some insight as to what was needed to improve our company's visibility and how our existing site could be changed and improved to effectively stand out from our competition and increase traffic. It took some time, but so far, using PPC along with SEO and SEM tactics has significantly increased our search rankings in most of the major search engines and our business has been steadily growing as a result. Remember, things don't change overnight, as we found, but documenting visitors search habits, noting the most frequently viewed pages and tweaking our site's structure and contenta accordingly has made a huge difference in how our website is utilized and how to "stand out from the crowd" in an ever-expanding market. Best of all, we can actually SEE the results of our SEO campaigns, so we know what topics to address right away without having to second guess. I recommend employing SEO (and a PPC campaign if possible)to anyone whose business depends on online activity. Results may not be immediate, but you'll see that it ends up paying off before long, and you'll be glad you took the time.
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