SEO for 2013 – From Rankings to Revenue
Our SEO services here at NCompass have picked up remarkably over the last year… if I were to say that about 30% of our revenue was for SEO I would not be far off (though I haven’t actually worked it out).
But big changes are due very very soon. It all follows Google Adwords and pay-per-click in general, it also focuses more and more in Results and Revenue and for businesses that want a return on their investments this is all good news. It is something we have always advocated. You can’t just spend money on the Internet and expect it to work. It simply won’t.
SEO is the webs ‘dark art’ – few understand it, few know what is involved and very very few can really and truly say that SEO has contributed in a measurable way to their companies success.
The result of this has been a classic ‘clutching of straws’ approach… “These are my keywords where do I rank?” It makes sense, it’s measurable, easy to see and clear to all levels of management, it provides the headline figures that senior people need to justify their spend in this area.
At this point I can digress in a dozen different directions so be warned:
- Digression 1 – Google has long promoted Content is King – get your content out and you’ll rank well (in other words ignore where you rank for what… just get the story out there
- Digression 2 – Personalisation of search – Google personalise your results based on your location, likes, contacts, habits and probably quite a lot more – so what you see when you type in a keyword simply is not what someone else sees. Rankings are simply wrong!
- Digression 3 – Social – where people find you is so far off a keyword it’s untrue. Facebook, Mobile Phones, Twitter all play their part… but really YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and if you think about that you start to realise that you need to rank for ALL of these.
- Panda, Penguin and now Pony updates to Google’s algorithm – When Google changes the rules we al suffer as the website plummets down 20 places. But are we focussing on the right thing?
- CPA – cost per acquisition – how much money do you spend to get a sale. Google Adwords has been providing this for years. It’s time SEO measured this metric as well
- Abandonment Rate – whose abandoning the shopping cart or viewing the contact us page and not completing that action. Why is it that so many websites have dozens of people look at a ‘contact us page’ yet only get a couple of enquiries a week. Why are people dropping out and if we measure the Abandonment Rate we can make a judgement on our success. Fix this and we will get far better results.
- Organic Growth – identifying SEO traffic to a website and measuring it’s growth. Forget individual keywords – but increase traffic generally from a far wider range of keywords and then combine that result with the CPA
- Non-Branded Keyword Growth – are the number of keywords and the traffic from then growing – are suddenly people finding your website via unexpected keywords
- Conversions – in every form… identifying conversion points (a submitted form, a page viewed, a product brought) and analysing them better to know what makes people press the magic button.
- Content Management – seeing how the addition of specific content has impact on a website’s traffic. Launch a new product and does it increase overall traffic… because it really ought to.