Taking the measure of search optimisation

By tids

By Simon van Wyk

Your online presence fairly bristles with opportunities to collect data about every visitor to your site. And it’s also easy to collect information about the competitive environment in which that your site operates. Measurement and analytics tools can inform your marketing with hard data about consumer behaviour that just can’t be measured in the offline environment.

In a world where your customers use Internet search to inform an increasing proportion of their business decisions, from the most basic to the most critical, getting your website into a strong search engine position is crucial.

Whether you’ve put extensive (and expensive) resources into search engine optimisation (SEO), or you are still testing the waters, its vital to test and analyse your site based on actual, measurable data rather than subjective opinions.

There are plenty of search analytics services and tools available which will gather data, report and interpret the performance of your website on search engines.

There are two types of site analytics: on-site (that is, measuring the traffic on your own website) and off-site (which might measure competitors’ sites, potential customers and other aspects of the overall web environment).

Site analytics tools allow you to record a wide range of information about the visitors to your site. You can record the geographic location of each arrival, which site they arrived from, what they are looking at – even how much time they spend on each page.

But it is in combination with other information that site analytics becomes a most useful market research tool. For example, you can measure the effect of the launch of a new ad campaign (either online or offline, using traditional print or broadcast media), by tracking changes of site traffic over time.

What data should you pay attention to?

Your own site will deliver information about a number of areas:
Hits: (individual files served - not terribly useful unless you are analysing server load)
Visits: This is most useful when you look at trends over time, the number of unique visitors, their geographic origin, and which pages are visited most frequently.
Pages: Which page do people come to first (it won’t always be the home page); how long do they spend on a page; where do they go next.
Search keywords: If they came from a search engine, what keywords did visitors use to find you?

And market analysis can give you a huge amount of information including the following:
Search trends: What are your potential customers typically looking for?
Reverse search: Which keywords will deliver visitors to a particular site?
Keyword monitoring: what keywords are most frequently used?

Tools to use

Measurement has matured greatly from its somewhat arcane early days – while plenty of cowboys still roam the backwaters of the web, there is now a strong field of reputable players offering measurable and usually fairly robust services designed to arm you effectively to do battle for the coveted top spots in the search engines.

ClickTracks: Aimed at marketers without a strong technical background, these tools range from $25 per month upwards and specialise in giving detailed analysis about the behaviour of visitors to your site.

CoreMetrics: This tool has some unique features that are useful if you operate an online store.

Google Analytics: This free tool brings end-to-end adwords reporting for sites and is the most-used first step in most web analytics programs.

Omniture: The hosted analytics packages include data-mining and other tools and are rated as one of the easier-to-use options, but you pay more for the comprehensive service.

Webtrends: This company offer a range of tools useful for understanding your customers and the overall marketplace. They offer a range of packages – either hosted or installed on your own server – with prices ranging between around $30 a month.