Website Optimisation Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

This is the 7th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results “hybrid” approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

How Well Are Your Natural Search Campaigns Converting?

Once the fat has been trimmed from your paid search campaigns and your website content is performing well, the next step is natural search engine optimisation.

Most Search Engine optimisation campaigns deal with the question of how to generate more traffic to a website and this is certainly a worthy goal. But it’s just as important to remember that you also want to target the right kind of traffic. That is, traffic that leads to more opt-ins, leads and sales.

Another useful application of Google Analytics is that it allows you to distinguish between traffic generated via natural search and paid search.

When deciding which keyword phrases to target in your SEO efforts, it’s useful to know which keywords are already converting via paid search. You can use conversion tracking within Google Adwords (and/or more advanced tools within Google Analytics) to establish this.

The next step is to establish how competitive your target keyword phrase is - are there dozens of well-ranked competitors in the space already, or are there no strong competitors?

Assessing the strength of your competition can be complicated, but one of the best resources for simplifying the process is the SEOmoz Page Strength Tool.

If the websites who already occupy the search engine rankings you’d like to occupy have high Page Strength scores, it may be wiser to start with less competitive key phrases and work your way up.

Above: output from a “CPC vs Organic Conversion” report within Google Analytics. [cpc] refers to paid search and [organic] refers to “free” search engine traffic. In this example, two conversion goals called G1 and G2 are being tracked. The system also allows drilling down to get a clearer picture of what’s going on.

N.B. This screen can be accessed via the Marketing Optimisation > Search Engine Marketing > CPC vs Organic Conversion menu within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a surprisingly powerful platform, especially considering that it’s free! The danger lies in falling into the trap of thinking that data = knowledge.

Conclusion

In a previous post I wrote about the democratization of web technologies. In years gone by, companies spent their online optimization budgets on either media or the “widgets”, software and systems to drive their website. Now, those technologies are becoming freely available - now smart organisations are shifting their focus to invest in clever people.

Converting analytical data into actionable strategies is why companies retain consultants such as Marketing Results.

This article concludes this 7-part series. What did you think? What did I leave out that you think should have been included? Leave a comment and I’ll respond to your feedback.

Will Swayne Website Optimizer

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