Recognized leader in digital transformation, partner of Highbridgefounder of Martech Zone, public speaker, author, podcaster and consultant.
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Increasing overall business results can start with reviewing and implementing improved analytics tags on your business site.
Let’s say your data reveals exceptional search engine traffic conversion rates that are significantly higher than ads or social media. This doesn’t mean other channels should be ignored, just that there is potential for increased sales if current landing pages could be optimized and new pages provided that have significantly better content than the competition.
A critical tool used in an audit is a search engine optimization (SEO) platform. These platforms monitor both paid and organic search and keyword volumes, and provide a host of tools that provide insight into on-page optimization opportunities. Pages can be optimized using a number of methods, including:
• Optimized infrastructure to improve page speed.
• Optimized titles to increase page indexing for relevant keyword searches.
• Optimized meta descriptions that would better entice search engine users to click through to search engine results pages.
• Optimized page content with improved believability, better subtitling and use of formatting, videos and other images.
Of course, there are concerns from whether the site will lose rank to whether to prioritize errors and warnings that an SEO platform revealed. Such concerns are not uncommon, but they are often unwarranted given the context of the overall strategy.
Search engine optimization is often seen by consultants to feed a search engine’s algorithms, which may be in direct conflict with the wishes of the search engine user. At their core, all search engines want to deliver better search engine results to users. As a result, it helps focus on the user, not the machine.
Some errors and warnings affect users. An example is broken internal links where a user cannot find the information they tried to navigate to. However, many more errors and warnings do not affect users. Here are some examples:
• Mark an advertising landing page so that it is not indexed by search engines. Google Search Console and many SEO platforms will report this as an error when you do it on purpose. Intentionally hide different ad offers so they don’t attract organic search traffic.
• Develop a meaningless landing page with a registration form and it comes with a warning because it has low text-to-HTML ratios. Adding text would defeat the very purpose of the design, which is just to provide a path to register and convert.
Search engine marketing platforms provide amazing reports on virtually every digital feature of your site. What SEO platforms do not do, however, is provide useful information to visitors. Here’s an example we keep seeing: sites rank for an irrelevant keyword that generates tons of traffic that bounces immediately and never converts. Great for algorithms, featured on all SEO platforms, but absolutely useless for your business.
In fact, it can even frustrate visitors. There are quite a few brands in the tech space that do their best to own keyword rankings but offer nothing of value on their landing pages. Now I skip those sites when I’m researching my industry.
Let’s review these concerns and rephrase the question to important concerns:
• Are current site rankings generating high-value visitor conversion rates?
• Do errors and recommendations affect ranking and subsequent purchase behavior?
An ideal first step in every SEO strategy is to ensure that tags are properly managed across the site to accurately capture campaigns, events and conversions. You should always work from conversion to search engine to identify the right target audience, the right content and compare the customer to legitimate competitors.
When you understand how your potential customers use search engines to find the products or services you offer, only then can you optimize your site and content to attract the right search engine users. SEO platforms are critical in helping you do this, but only after you can link purchasing behavior to search engine behavior.
So how do you know what to ignore and what not to? If you use Google Analytics:
1. Link your Google Ads account in your Google Analytics property.
2. Configure Search Console data in Google Analytics.
3. Make sure all campaigns, such as email, app notifications, or text messages are correctly labeled with UTM campaign code.
4. Check yours default channel definitions in Google Analytics and modify them to ensure that all traffic is correctly classified by channel.
5. Use goals to measure how often users take specific actions.
Google doesn’t report activity on its initiated accounts, so tracking organic search visits by keyword to conversion is nearly impossible. However, you can use an SEO platform to identify which pages are ranking on your site and for which keywords. At this point, you can use analytics to identify these pages as entry points and start analyzing whether these visitors are engaged and converting.
Now you have a much clearer picture of how search engine users are finding, interacting and converting on your site. It’s time to work backwards to identify the keywords you could rank best for and the pages you should optimize or create to attract those visitors. This is when your SEO platform can help, but only after you focus on the visitors who matter, not all search visitors.
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