SEO-The Beauty, The Beast
The Beauty
Okay, you have invested in a robust SEM/SEO strategy. All the bells and whistles; Title tags, meta tags, inbound links, keyword analysis, tailored content, google analytics, directory submission, blogging, email blasts, google ad words, press releases and even put together this crazy YouTube video. You anxiously await the analytics report each day to see if you made any traction. You analyze all of the metrics; the hits, the bounce rate, the average time on site, what pages they went to. You look at the ever-valuable goal conversion chart to see if any of your goals have been met. You look at where the hits are coming from… WOW! Someone from India ventured on to your site. You think maybe you should open an office in Bangalore in preperation for all the business that’s going to come in.
The Beast
But wait just a second before you start cracking open the bubbly. Have you taken a moment to look at what the masses are coming to?? Have you missed to entire premise of steering people to your site. Have you looked at your site from the point-of-view of the customer. You could have the best optimized site in the world but it won’t mean a hill of beans unless when someone arrives they have found what they were looking for.
This is the classic cart before the horse story 2.0. So what about your site? Have you analyzed your site with the same vim and vigor that you analyzed your word tracker. Have you optimized the look, the feel, and the navigation. When is the last time you looked, God forbid, at the content of your website. Even more relevant, when was the last time you added new content to your website.
I’m not disparaging SEO by any stretch. But what’s the point in steering people to your site only to have them leave as fast as they came. Consider “first impressions.” Sometimes the only chance you have with a potential customer is that first impression. Two great indicators from analytics to study are bounce rate and average time spent on site. These will clue you in to whether your site has stickiness or slipperyness.
Eventually, web sites began to give more focus to attracting visitors and getting these visitors to take action. With a lack of detailed tracking, these marketing efforts were difficult to measure and adjust. The booming market in search advertising helped fuel the creation of modern analytics software which gave web sites the ability to segment their audience and truly evaluate their marketing campaigns. This not only gave advertisers a level of tracking unavailable in any other form of advertising, it also furthered the science of creating web sites by giving designers a better understanding of how to build sites for maximum effectiveness.
Well the best thing you have done is by investing in seo, some companies do not even do that.