The Bigger SEO Picture – Knowing What's Important

Big Banana in Coffs Harbour

I’m a big picture person. This served me well as a special education teacher as I would rarely sweat the small stuff, choosing to focus instead on what really mattered which generally involved some form of learning as well as some form of safety i.e no-one gets hurt. So in this world of SEO that I’ve been absorbed for a decent portion of my professional career, I am also more about what I feel really matters (like conversions) rather than some of the specifics (like rankings). Sometimes though, these things come together and that is why I enjoy analytics so much. Identification and tracking of data has become a bit of an obsession of late particularly with smaller businesses that have so many holes because they’re often wearing multiple hats or focused on providing services than worrying about their marketing infrastructure.

When we first opened shop, we found the easiest way to reflect the work we offered was to add analytics and then target the most important aspects of their website for our reports. A contact form was most likely. Possibly a digital download or a unique URL. That’s kind of where it stopped. So for that person who sent our client an inquiry after going to Google, typing in “Graphic Design Company”, a phrase that they didn’t rank for before but now are front and center on Search Engines, unless the client asked how the prospect found them, we really don’t know where that new client came from because, for whatever reason, there is no inquiry form on their website or the prospect called them on the phone and they never asked how they found them.

So that new client who will be spending $50K in the next year with you came through an initiative that you’ve been questioning about spending $5K/year for mostly because you didn’t ask how they found you. That’s a significant return on your investment but if you don’t know about it, that’s a problem.

Obviously e-commerce makes it a lot easier because we can actually set up revenue tracking and it takes us through the whole process, we’ve also set up call tracking so the client can close the gap between the web and the telephone. Nice and clean thank you very much. Unfortunately most businesses don’t work that way. A prospect may have originated from the Web but there might be several touches with the prospect throughout the sales cycle, several staff members may have to become involved to help seal the deal and in the end, when you close the deal, SEO may well have been the forgotten source.

Having worked in or with larger organizations or agencies, I’ve seen how integrated their initiatives can be. A big CRM that is actually tied together with analytics and fully integrated into the website makes for an incredibly seamless data source. It relies less on staff input  and more on actual hard and fast data and the reporting can be amazing. These things will show you every little detail from a go to whoa. Very impressive. Our aim is to be able to do this on a small scale which is the greatest challenge. Having to rely on workarounds and hacks to get what we need can tighten things up only takes you so far. The gaps still exist.

While these challenges will continue, if you’re a client of ours or working with another Internet Marketing company there are a few basics that you should be covering.

1. Make sure you have analytics installed on your website. We generally prefer Google Analytics because of the price point for smaller companies but there are a bunch of others out there that are affordable and really help to give you a better understanding of your website’s performance.

2. Identify and create conversion points or as we often refer to them, Key Performance Indicators (KPI). If your website doesn’t have an inquiry form, we’ll generally insist on adding one. Phone tracking has also become a pretty significant requirement and while it’s not necessarily cheap, it’s not outrageous and is well worth the investment.

3. Analyze and assess your campaign at least every month. We do monthly reports for our clients which allows us to get a solid overall perspective on our clients’ website performance and will then review with them. We do encourage them to go and have a look for themselves regularly as well.

4. Ask your prospects how they found you. Sure this is pretty challenging in many circumstances but it’s pretty important especially if you’ve invested a good sum of money into your Internet Marketing campaign.

Don’t assume that we won’t obsess over search rankings because there is still a pretty close relationship between a strong keyword position and conversion points but obviously with personalized search and geo-targeting and all the other initiatives that search engines are famous for, it makes for a pretty difficult justification of our activities. For us, analytics is the sweet spot and allows us to not only obsess over every little detail of your campaign, but give us a much clearer big picture.

Paul Fleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife, son and another on the way.

PaulFleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.