(Part VI of a Series on Web Analytics for Search Engine Marketing)
There are lots of ways the web analysis can supplement or improve your overall Search program. Many of these take advantage of the unique view that web analytics provides across PPC, SEO, external advertising and direct traffic. Today’s installment is on measuring the cost of SEO – and I don’t mean how much you pay to your consultants!
SEO is enjoying something of a resurgence in the large corporate world – and that’s probably a good thing. Organic listings are vitally important to any well managed Search Engine Marketing program – and SEO can provide much higher returns on investment than almost any other type of web site (or PPC) optimization.
That being said, good SEO is hardly free. Yes - thanks to the needlessly prolix environment created by the Search Engines, you’ll almost certainly have to rely on expensive paid advice to do high-quality SEO (I’m often asked how to SEO a site, and I pretty much shrug my shoulders and say "heck-If-I-Know") but that isn't what I'm mainly concerned with.
The real cost of SEO - and the one you need web analytics for - is understanding the usability cost to SEO changes. To really optimize a site you need to have the SEO effort built right into the seams of your content. Adding an SEO gloss on a site (by improving titles and meta-tags, for example) can provide some incremental lift – and has the advantage of being quick, easy and relatively painless. But it isn’t likely to transform your organic positions. To do that, you’ll almost certainly need to re-work your basic content.
And that’s where we come to a real quandary. In my experience, SEO experts are always clashing with site designers about the specifics of site implementation. Will or does a set of SEO optimizations really decrease usability? And if so, how should this be measured versus the increased lift in traffic? Nobody ever seems to know.
Web Analytics can provide detailed understanding of both the increased organic lift generated by SEO improvements and any decrease in the actual efficiency of the site in converting visitors. And naturally, there isn’t one right answer here – though I will say that our measurement has more often supported the case for SEO than otherwise.
One important aspect of this is that measuring changes in efficiency can be quite tricky. If you try to measure a single page’s changes against overall conversion, the impact is likely to be too small to judge reliably. Instead, we employ a "Functionalist" methodology (I’m going to be writing quite a bit about this in the upcoming weeks so I thought I’d plug it here!) to measure fine-grained changes in how well a page is performing particular role on the site.
Measuring the real performance impact of SEO changes can make it much clearer what – if any – is the real cost to SEO improvements. Designers and SEO experts can argue forever about who is right, but there really is no other way for YOU to evaluate this argument sensibly.
(Note – I’m in New York for a week or so and I’m not sure if I’ll be posting anything till around the 21st of June! I promise not to write about how my girls enjoyed the Lion King!)
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