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Web Site Analytics

By Gord on 05 11th, 2009

I just returned from a Web site analytics seminar in Boston. It was conducted by one of the leading US consulting firms in web analytics. The one day seminar at the Omni Parker House Hotel in Downtown Boston was lead by Justin Cutroni who wrote the book Google Analytics published by O’Reily Media (ISBN: 978-0-596-51496-9).

The seminar covered all the web tracking advanced elements such as setting up goal and funnels, event tracking, visitor segmentation, filters, and issues related to subdomains. Most of the material presented I am familiar with, however we did discover the limitations of Google Analytics and that even for experts, visitor tracking can be complex. A lot of people were hoping that GA had the ability to track over multiple domains and subdomains but it is limited in its ability to do it. It can’t track pdfs, mp3’s and other non-html files. It can’t track bandwidth either for those who would like to keep an eye on usage.

The fact that Google analytics is free and can help you gain significant insight into who your visitors are what they want is good reason to use it. GA’s capabilities will grow given that Google recognizes the need to help web businesses improve their sales conversion capabilities. When you consider how much companies are spending on PPC campaigns, converting sales is critical to their survival.

If you’re not an ecommerce site owner, using Google analytics and drilling down into the data can help you develop visitor profiles and to understand what content they’re interested in. Few web site owners plan their websites for collecting visitor data, yet it is very important.

Google Website Optimizer

Another Google service called Web site optimizer can help you test your content to see which is resulting in serious leads or sales. Sadly, not all sites can use website optimizer and it does require a little programming to ensure it doesn’t interfere with page functionality. If it is possible to use it on your website, you should look into it. Fine tuning your content to give users exactly what they want could easily double leads and sales.

Google analytics and website conversion testing should be an integral part of your SEO campaign, because as everyone is learning during the recession, traffic by itself is not enough. An SEO company that can help you test your content and improve conversions is really adding value to your online marketing effort.

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Online Marketing Stats

By Gord on 12 17th, 2007

Marketing Priorities and Plans

B2B Online published a new report called Marketing Priorities and Plans that 79% of marketers they polled expect to increase their marketing budgets for 2008 and that online marketing budgets will increase the most (almost 25% increase over last year).

In another report, B2B discussed the need for marketing expansion beyond US borders and into the global arena. With North American markets lagging and the US dollar low, it is a great time to look overseas to new markets and expand marketing presence in those markets, from the UK to Germany to China and Malaysia. More product design, manufacturing and purchasing are being conducted in the Asia Pacific region, hence a growing opportunity for US manufacturers to sell their products and even marketing services.

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Corporate Web Site Optimization - Start Thinking Creatively

By Gord on 11 19th, 2007

The Unfair Advantage

You would think many large corporations with huge SEO budgets would possess a dominant position in the search engine rankings. The number of marketing partners, suppliers, and multimillion dollar promotional campaigns do create a good number of inbound links to their corporate web sites. Some corporations have an endless number of web sites and some have even hired big SEO companies to manage or assist with their search engine presence.

Yet even with all of that immense ranking power, their site rankings in Google and Yahoo are unremarkable. So, with all that funding and intent to rank well, why is it some of them have rankings that lag below where they ideally should be?

The first reason is obvious: poor optimization strategies. The in-house optimizers lacking significant SEO strategic knowledge and experience follow a standard, textbook type of optimization (or no strategy) which wastes ranking resources or which search engines interpret is excessively optimized. Search engines are looking for guidance and it is a professional optimizers purpose to provide the right framework and pathway throughout the site. The second is big corporations’ reliance on Pagerank and internal pagerank distribution via menu links. The third is the lack of grass roots organic link building strategy. The link building strategy is a campaign in itself with its own needs. Since paid links are showing decreasing returns, it is the corporate SEOs organic link building campaign that will determine the site’s success from here on in.

Text link buying has changed the way the spider and analyze content and they’re discounting navigation menu links. It comes down to the crafty optimization of copy on the pages. Without optimized copy, corporate sites are at a serious disadvantage, yet corporate copywriters dislike SEO copywriting and many marketing managers prefer standard web or print media type copy. If millions in sales are on the line, it is up to an SEO to communicate the need for optimized copy. And this is the type of copy that gets results. It’s creative, it’s tricky, it’s full of twists and turns, but it resonates with search engine algorithms, which are tuned to finding unique content.

As examples, you might look at http://www.wyndham.com/ and http://www.starwoodhotels.com/. Both sites lack top rankings and rely almost completely on inbound links for their rankings. The sites are full of links to almost orphaned pages, using linking that tells the search engine little about what it is spidering, and with no thought to how the site itself is wired together. Starwood’s pages have urls that look like this: http://www.starwoodhotels.com/preferredguest/promotions/registration/landing_page.html?promoID=C4T&IM=CORP_HP_TL_EN_SEG_CENTRALBONUSSP. Sites such as http://www.marriott.com/ have vast SEO budgets and should certainly rank at the top for each city market, yet they don’t. Instead they’re beaten by grass roots mom and pop travel sites or big mega travel sites such as http://www.tripadvisor.com/. Losing to tripadvisor.com is hardly shameful given the effort they put into acquiring organic rankings. They spare no expense and are intensely aware of the organic structure of their site.

Corporate Site Problems

Corporate sites normally have a stiff, unresponsive architecture and a lack of relevant content. Traditional web site and print copy is branding focused which means the copy isn’t about the object, it’s about the imagery surrounding the object. A page on a hotel web site for instance rarely uses the word “hotel” because it’s not sexy enough. It might use words such as luxury accommodation or spa experience or some other impressive description meant to conjure up images of comfort and opulence. Search engines don’t equate those words although they have tried. Reading between the lines is something they would like to do, but the complex of semantic analysis is something that is still well beyond their grasp. Search engines are still literal. If you want them to think your web site is about “Orlando Hotels” then Orlando hotels will need to be used well within your site.

Can you plaster your site with “Orlando hotels” and hope to rank high for that phrase? No, keyword density won’t do it for you. It isn’t the presence of the keyword phrases in the site’s pages but rather how they’re used. The context of the keyword usage within the copy and linking creates good rankings. When overdone or underdone, search engines lose the meaning, or treat it as an optimization or spam attempt.

Sometimes too, technical problems occur on sites. The use of 302 redirects is a good example of something search engines don’t like. Dynamic pages that change their linking structure frequently, and page templates that won’t permit custom modification of content are two perennial problems.

The number one reason however, is a lack of sophisticated keyword strategy that taps every possible ranking asset and focuses it across a site. This level of sophisticated content and linking requires ingenuity and inventiveness. This is the kind of creativity that requires more than just outside the box thinking, it is the kind of creativity you sometimes see with high end game software programmers. People who think differently and may not fit into a typical corporate environment. These people see solutions almost immediately, or they will work toward the solution intuitively. They aren’t process oriented. They are goal oriented. The game must work, be stimulating to end users, and have the elements that game buyers are turned on to. They see the whole and they don’t necessarily always start at the beginning. Thinking inductively and deductively, they eventually piece together a masterpiece.

Organic search engines are interested in ranking sites based on peculiar features. These features can be studied and replicated on a web site, but it is usually the outside the box creative researcher/optimizer that takes the time to find them and understand them. Corporate optimizers tend to stay close to home, parroting phrases like pagerank.

SEO on big corporate sites is restricted and the most sensible solution is to create a separate site for search engine rankings. I tell this to many clients and prospects but there is a strong resistance to maintaining two web sites. There is also strong resistance to keyword specific search engine optimization. So, the end result is a corporate site that doesn’t fare well.

One last reason for lagging results and loss of potential is a refusal to adapt to search engine requirements and to even possess a contempt for search engines like Google. Search engine rankings have to reflect the people’s interests for accurate and relevant information not the profit goals and needs of corporations.

Corporations can do well with organic search engine promotion if they respect the disorderly, natural and chaotic realm of web site publishing. That world is unlike the scheduled publication of intensely reviewed content delivered by corporate marketing departments. It is also sceptical of corporate communications and branding which often skew or distort the truth.

Your corporate web site can do well in search engine rankings. If you take an open minded approach and keep your mind on the goal of strong organic search engine presence, you’ll begin to see the available solutions.

Corporate web sites can be superior branding and sales generators but you can’t put the horse before the cart. The search engines are looking for particular features and not necessarily what your communications and designers created. Go back to the drawing board and look for creative solutions because organic search engine rankings are still the holy grail of modern marketing.

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Site Keyword Themes and Redesigning Your Site

By Gord on 10 25th, 2007

With every month that passes, Google moves toward stronger discounting of links within site navigation menus. They’re also relying more on site keyword themes as well. By doing this they can raise the quality of search engine listings and fend off SEO companies.
If your corporate site is seeing its rankings wane and you’re seeing overall keyword phrase variety decreasing, this may be the reason. Many corporate sites have a rigid templated structure where too many of the pages are the same, including navigation links. This makes the search engine work harder to determine the relevance of a particular page for a keyword search. In previous years, the search engine might make an intelligent guess by looking at the overall keyword theme of the site. Today, search engines focus more on the anchor text of links and the copy in the body text. If your site doesn’t use keywords and important related words strategically, it will be at a serious disadvantage against tough competition in the search results today. If you won’t use keywords in your pages, your competitors will. They know the value of lots of search engine rankings and referrals. They’ll do what’s necessary. I see many competitors get very creative and not be discouraged from creating new sites specifically for search engines.

An example of an unproductive design is www.nissanusa.com, a company with plenty of money to fund search engine marketing. Given the number of searches done for cars, automobiles and new cars, why wouldn’t a giant car manufacturer want to be found? Yet this site isn’t designed at all for search engines. It’s navigation is via a Flash movie and the homepage has no text other than a standard link menu at the bottom of the page. The site ranks for Nissan, Nissan Cars and Nissan Trucks, so it is basically a landing page for brand related searches generated by TV and on-street sightings by consumers. Nissan would have been wiser to create a separate text based site for search engines, a site free to be search engine friendly and searcher friendly. The current corporate site can be as it is focused on brand related searches and can even exist in Flash.
Isn’t all this Great Traffic Normal?
Companies get used to tens of thousands of visitors per month, even hundreds of thousands of search engine referrals every month. Some get spoiled thinking it’s their right to be Google’s favorite. Search engines evolve and really don’t care about branding issues and traditional copy style usage, or corporate guidelines. They have their plate full just trying to control search engine optimizers and spammers. Skilled SEO tacticians can come along too and eat away at rankings they took for granted.
Search engine algorithms have become so complex, that one wonders if they really know what they’re doing sometimes. Sometimes a big corporate site looks much like a spam site. The copy is about one particular keyword theme, yet the linking is desperately trying to suggest it is about another keyword theme. This is the case with many corporate sites where the copy is often adapted from brochures and with no reference to search engines. A few links are stuffed into a side bar and a small blurb with keywords is pushed into a few sub pages as if to say to the search engine “oh, we also are about this.” Unfortunately, search engines are wise to that ploy. Their slogan might well be “Be who you really are.” And that is what good SEO is all about and speaking in the search engine’s cryptic language.
Keyword density is given lots of discussion these days just like it did 9 years ago, however density isn’t the issue. There are too many examples of sites loaded with keywords appearing next in the rankings to pages with one or two keywords in them. It’s how the keywords are used that creates the right ranking power.
Links in navigation menus, particularly graphic buttons, often provide no clue as to meaning of the page linked to or accidentally misrepresent what the target page is about. It’s just common sense that search engines wouldn’t rely on those types of links as a factor in their algorithms. Navigation links often have words like home, privacy statement, and general words like products, services, contact, help and so on. These provide sparse information on the specific products and services the company provides.
It may be time to consider redesigning and rebuilding your site for search engines. I’ve seen it work so well for so many clients, that I recommend it strongly. If your company stands to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars or perhaps millions from search engine referrals, then the cost of optimizing it is a drop in the bucket.
What’s the difference between a high performing site and a poorly performing one? It is usually in the quality of optimization, quality of inbound links, and the number of pages on the site. I work with these three factors intensely to achieve maximum results for clients. I provide the search engines with what they need, within certain parameters. Being conservative yet pushing the envelope, I create sites that search engines respect. It is the crystal clear and strategic use of words that distinguishes failure from success.
Often I work with sites created for other purposes. The client’s assumption is always that I will be able to compensate for a bad design and irrelevant content. Somehow I should be able to make the site rank at the top for keywords the site either won’t use or which has little copy on it. More than not, these sites are underperformers and it is very tough to keep them afloat.
With Google’s relentless pursuit of text links and keyword themes, it is difficult to make rigid corporate sites rank ahead of more flexible competitors. It’s not just the keyword matching either which many SEOs overuse. It is how keywords and related words are used with links that tells Google your site is legit and relevant. Getting links from high Trustrank sites is all well and good, but that alone won’t create big successes. The precision and creativity of your keyword use is where huge success lies.
One option I always suggest is to use two web sites. One for formal presentation and offline marketing (business card urls) and one for search engine optimization. Don’t recoil at the thought of two web sites, when the end result may be millions of dollars in sales. Two sites may take a little more work and care, but how could $millions not be worth it?
If your corporate site is sinking, you should have Bay Street SEO Services looking into its slow demise and get it keyword relevant. It could be a life changing improvement for you and your firm.

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Can a Well Optimized Site Rank Well on its Own with lots of Inbound Links?

By Gord on 10 25th, 2007

I’ve witnessed many Web sites with few inbound links do very well in Google rankings, even several I’ve we’ve worked on. The caveat to that statement however, is that it normally takes quite a while for the site to get established and respected in Google’s index. Certainly some good inbound links are necessary in order for Google to spider the site with some interest, but if you wait long enough, Google will accept on-site optimization as credible and trustworthy. Trustrank is composed of many features and you can play to that algorithm component very well.
I can think of one particular site in the mortgage industry which I did not work with, that is currently ranking extremely well for many, many, good phrases, and another UK site I optimized which never had much link development performed. It’s ranking in the top ten for just about every relevant phrase. Sometimes you get surprised in this business. These site’s success is astonishing really. And amazingly, the fact that they have few inbound links, and most are not particularly good quality, makes it difficult to understand, given that Google is still a popularity based search engine with an accent on link reputation. The site is relevant of course, but to say it is more relevant than 200 other direct competitors may be an overstatement. However, in one case, the site is well optimized.
I’m well studied in link reputation and how it is passed via links and yet there are always those times when you scratch your head. I’m used to working with underdog sites, sites that seemingly have little chance of usurping the big sites, but over time, they in fact do get ranked and receive quality traffic. You wouldn’t want to gamble your company’s future though deliberately trying for the lucky win. It is better to invest an appropriate amount with a thorough SEO effort that ensures quality traffic from consistent exposure — where loss of one ranking won’t effect overall organic revenue/traffic.
The fact that it takes time for weak sites to rank indicates how important time elements are in Google’s algorithm. There are temporal algorithm components for short term and long term features of pages. The freshness element for instance, helps in some regards since an updated site indicates that it is being maintained and kept current, and there is new information being posted, much like a blog has. On the other hand, the longer a site and its pages have been in the Google index without changes, signifies stability and that it hasn’t been SEO’d. Google likes old pages and sites because they trust their authenticity. And, by keeping new sites out of the index, site owners may have to buy text link advertising to gain traffic. The appearance of not being optimized is something professional grade SEOs try to achieve. Some care has to be taken in modifying sites so they look like normal page changes. Often, wholesale changes create no visible effect in rankings. Changes can affect Pagerank and link reputation distribution as well. Many site owners discover this the hard way and lose their rankings for some time. Even the introduction of a new page can lower rankings.
Without a lot of inbound links, your site may take a long time (1 year+) to gain rankings, but surprisingly, when sites are well optimized, they often do gravitate slowly upward until one day, they appear in the top ten. Before one year, that isn’t likely going to happen, but if you’re in business for the long term, a well optimized site is going to produce for you eventually.

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Self Managed SEO - The In Sourcing Nightmare

By Gord on 10 18th, 2007

A recent tv commercial for a financial advisor service company shows an overweight, middle aged man standing in his kitchen talking on the phone to his heart surgeon. The heart surgeon tells him how to make the incision so he can do his own heart surgery. And he has a butter knife in his hand!

That commercial speaks perfectly to how ridiculous it is to in-source your SEO campaigns. Nightmare is the right word to describe it too. A severe loss of opportunity is one of the worst mistakes a business can make, particularly those that need new customers and markets. Even insourcing of pay per click campaigns is not wise. In SEO however, the average web site marketer or webmaster does not have the skills or insight into search engine practices, indexing methods and algorithms to take their site to the top. What results is mediocre traffic and poor conversions. One of our clients receives a 35% conversion rate and they rank well for many more phrases. An inhouse amateur would only rank for a few. In house SEOs don’t have the breadth of experience or large collection of sites to maintain a global perspective and understand what optimization tactics are creating the best benefit.

SEO In-sourcing has occured because companies have been buying text links by the bucketload and on-site optimization has played a seemingly lesser role in rankings. So marketing managers are thinking, “well if we can buy rankings and it doesn’t matter what content we have and how it is organized, then why bother with professional SEO? Lets just buy more links and be rid of SEO altogether. Our Webmaster can plug in a few keyword phrases here and there and meet the “density” requirements”.

It’s important for you as marketing manager to understand the loss of potential from saving a few dollars. If you stand to make 100 thousand dollars to 5 million in sales for instance, why would base your strategy/campaigns on saving a few thousand by bringing it in house? A professional SEO multiplies the traffic and conversions and has a better understanding of what Google and Yahoo are doing.

Loss of Opportunity

Losing great opportunities hurts a business badly. There is so much competition in search engines that you really need the best minds working for you. Not choosing the best minds really says a lot about your goals and where you see yourself and your company finishing. If the best SEO costs thousands more, yet generates ten times the end revenue, then a smart manager knows what to do. Search engine marketing is the pinnacle and core of online marketing for the next ten years. A professional, studied and strategic approach could guarantee your business success during that time.

It is competitive in search engines because everyone knows the value is incredible. Google earned more than 4 billion in the last quarter attesting to how desperate advertisers are to gain a presence on Google’s search properties. Top ranking sites perform better overall with a multiplication of visits. This is the key deliverable from a top SEO provider — multiplied traffic and high rankings on competitive phrases. Even when we lose a top ranking for a particular keyword phrase, the client’s traffic stays the same. They don’t even know a particular phrase has dropped. Business flow is the same every month. It’s carefree and the return on investment is excellent.

There are some well known SEOs providing instruction, but unless the student is a well rounded technical/creative person, it will all be for nought. It is a disservice to clients to let them think they can do it themselves. If you still don’t believe me, outsource your top creative talent on staff, or have your junior sales rep take over your own job. Would your big successes still be there? Would you still be as confident of your businesses future?

Of course not. You have experience, skill and talent and it is irreplacable. Successful business managers don’t settle for second place or tenth place. And in a time when US business needs to increase productivity to stay competitive, while India, China and Europe grow in strength, this is not a time for amateurs.

The results we’ve achieved for our clients aren’t enjoyed by their competitors, who struggle to maintain rankings on a few keyword phrases. They receive a small amount of the potential traffic. Many of them won’t hire a professional firm and often look to a web design company or their own staff to optimize the site. What a terrible waste, but very good for Bay Street SEO’s current and future clients.

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Text Link Ads Ban - Banned for Selling Text Links

By Gord on 10 18th, 2007

It looks as though text-link-ads.com has been banned from Google’s organic search results. There are the usual rumors involving those companies that sell text links for the purpose of improved Google rankings, but this one looks real. At least for now. Some pundits suggest it has to do with selling text links, but the truth is more likely in how text link ads goes about promoting their services. Too often, these service providers go overboard in mentioning search engine rankings and Pagerank.

Anyone involved seriously in SEO knows pagerank is a very minor factor in rankings anymore. Keyword reputation and trustrank are the issues now, along with the various specific filters Google uses. So why would a text link seller trumpet Pagerank as a key factor? Why would they even bother mentioning improved link popularity and rankings so emphatically and repetitively when everyone in the industry already knows these are the key deliverables? Why not move onto new benefits or features of the links?

It is the boasting of Pagerank and rankings improvement, that really makes Google respond to such blatant marketing. Google’s already said that it’s algorithm is taking care of paid links just fine. The practice isn’t the problem, it’s loud marketing schemes that get them riled. In your face marketing doesn’t work for anyone.

If a text link seller is actively selling Pagerank and boasting about it, they’re going to get into trouble. Tone it down and create a legitimate service with real value for advertisers. What’s worse, is Text Link Ads often states where they’re placing links which is not good after mentioning Pagerank and rankings improvements in marketing literature.

Many of the link sellers are often selling false value. Many of them know the links they sell are useless and provide no benefit or visits. They play it all up hoping to pull the wool over advertiser’s eyes. A quick look at rankings for the sites some of these advertisers are paying dearly for are not showing appropriate rankings. That means Google and Yahoo and MSN have effectively filtered them out.

There’s nothing wrong with text link ads and recent news shows that text advertising is now taking a dominant share of online advertising revenue. It’s a tough job for Google to try to make their organic algorithm relevant admidst the text link revolution. It’s best not to rub it in their face by boasting about high pagerank and improved rankings.

If Google and Yahoo’s algorithms are relevant, text link ads should be controllable and not disturb the ranking index. However, when the search engines sense a weakness in their systems, they will respond with penalties, thus letting everyone know they do indeed have a weakness. Black hatters are ready for these smoke signals of course and then turn it on even more.

Personally, I think Google should improve its pattern detection filters and use the link buying craze as an impetus to improve their algorithm. Make a positive of a negative.

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Yahoo still hurting - time to get SEO friendly

By Gord on 08 25th, 2007

Yahoo’s stock continues to plummet as I said in a post last winter. Yahoo has had two high profile resignations of senior executives and the company’s woes seem to be accelerating. .
There may be a number of reasons why the company is faring so poorly, but from an SEO standpoint, Yahoo isn’t accessible. SEOs don’t trust Yahoo and are not willing to pay to play, especially since the quantity and quality of traffic from the aging search engine pales in comparison to Google. It’s time for the company to pare down its payroll and get back to basics.

Why is it necessary to concern themselves with search engine marketers? Pay per click programs aren’t showing the ROI that many search engine marketers expect. The market is tougher since PPC prices are on the rise and conversion rates have dropped.

Statistics reveal that more money is being directed into organic search engine optimization not because marketers want to abandon PPC campaigns, but because they’re looking to improve ROI. They can’t do with their PPC campaigns alone, so they’re hoping free organic traffic will make the ppc campaigns look more cost effective.

Yahoo overestimated advertising buyer’s patience with poor returns and they appear to be turning away from the new advertising platform. Even with its ad testing and geo targetting, the fanfare has died and Yahoo is back with its original problem - no access to searchers. It is search that people use Yahoo for, no matter how else the company sees itself. It has taken its customers for granted and it’s search engine algorithm has no respect from users or search engine optimization specialists.

When experts speak of Yahoo’s turmoil, surprisingly few refer to its relationship with the search engine optimization community and about the quality of search results. By skewing the search results to squeeze more money from web site owners however, they’ve shot themselves in the foot so to speak. To make their search engine more popular, it should revert to a faster version that focuses on satisfying searcher’s needs, and not to fill the page with graphics and advertising. Searchers want text information and links to click to get where they want to go. Yahoo’s busy homepage isn’t where they want to go.

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ROI Measurement Still a Mystery to Online Marketers

By Gord on 08 15th, 2007

A recent research project conducted by Jupiter Research revealed that few online marketers are able or willing to measure the performance of search engine optimization or paid search campaigns. The study also showed that those companies who outsourced SEO to a specialist search engine optimization provider increased their ROI considerably. This could be due to the SEO specialists interest in measuring performance. The SEO expert may be more interested in gaining recognition for the results they’ve generated, whereas clients may wish to play that down for fear of having to pay the SEO what they are worth.

Those companies who outsourced SEO management with an outside firm — and who also participate in paid search advertising net a higher ROI from SEO (36%) than from paid search advertising (11%). Given the amount of money being infused into paid search advertising, this is a stat that everyone should take note of. It clearly shows that SEO specialists are delivering more than 3 times the results possible via paid ads.

32% of respondents in the study could not measure their return on investment or were unable to. Fewer marketers were paying attention to offline sales as well. It is widely believed that many more sales are generated offline than online. This is because people use search engines for research, and then shop locally. It stands to reason that if measurement is not taking place, then a good effort isn’t being made to drive traffic to retail stores nor to encourage online sales. The whole issue could point to marketers not being as effective in using search engine marketing as they could be.

The study also revealed that search marketers including SEO specialist’s performance was being judged according to the amount of traffic generated. The quality of traffic was difficult to determine without metrics. Today though, more Search engine marketers are being evaluated based on the sales results. This trend likely shows clients are taking search engine referral traffic for granted and are now asking search marketers to get more out of the traffic they generate.

Measuring ROI is a difficult challenge, yet analytics systems are available to measure. There are off the shelf e-commerce analytics software packages available, however their cost can be prohibitive. Sometimes the marketer can assess performance based on traffic, keyword referrals and resulting sales. Not a perfect way but perhaps close enough for many. Google analytics is a free analytics program that doesn’t have the depth and flexibility of custom developed packages, but for the average web site owner, it can be extremely helpful in discovering the source of sales and ROI. The Google analytics code is placed in web pages, and the stats are collected and presented in the Google Analytics interface.

Given that Google analytics is free and easy to use, it is perhaps the most popular method marketers are using to gauge ROI.

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Corporate Web Site Optimization - Start Thinking Creatively

Site Keyword Themes and Redesigning Your Site

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