SEO Blog

The temptation to tinker always exists. Whether it’s your on-page content, PPC campaigns or keyword targeting, making changes can be a positive thing as well as negative. Therefore it’s important to pick your time to tinker, as well as understanding when it’s best to leave well alone.

So what is the answer?

Well, you can’t leave your keywords and copy the same forever. A day will come where a change is necessary in order to refresh your site and move things forward. However, deciding when the best possible time to do so is far from easy.
(more…)

For most businesses, it is hugely important that there is a measurable ROI on any marketing work they carry out. For some any form of profit will suffice, for others though there are strict targets to meet – otherwise big changes are made.

If you’re all about the bottom line, as many companies and individuals are, you might be seeking a fivefold return on your investment (or thereabouts). But with a website, where you might be using multiple marketing channels simultaneously, it’s not always easy to calculate the total income, let alone where the money came from.

(more…)

There are a fair few metrics for measuring the impact of an SEO campaign. However, not all webmasters use the same ones, whilst agencies and consultants choose to only report on others. So which are the most important for you?

The first, and arguably most difficult to measure is the return on investment (ROI). If you’ve been throwing money at an expensive SEO campaign you want to see some form of financial return. Unfortunately, without setting up effective tracking through an analytics package (often requiring the usage of a Thank You page), ROI can only really be determined by manually calculating income and determining which traffic can from which source.
(more…)

Just as website statistics can bring great joy into your life, they can also bring abject despondency too. Whilst you can’t hide from the truth, there are certainly many ways in which to interpret the figures it provides.

This of course sounds a little foolish. Numbers are numbers, there really is only one way to interpret them. However, sometimes you need to look beyond the figures and give greater consideration to the meaning behind them. What nonsense am I talking? Well, imagine your site wide traffic has gone down. Does that mean that your rankings have fallen away overnight and you’ll soon be out of business? No, not at all.
(more…)

There are a number of SEOs and digital marketing agencies who swear by analytics software. Of course it will deliver you some nice general statistics to help boost your ego and let you know how healthy the site is in general.

But visits alone are pretty hollow. All websites receive some ‘hits’, but simply knowing how many people see your site won’t actually tell you  how well it is performing. It’s only when you start to look a little closer and find out how individual pages and keywords are doing, even the way in which customers are reacting to particular areas. This is the real bread and butter of a site and the SEO work you’re performing.
(more…)

When you’re doing Search Engine Optimisation, regardless of your experience in the field, there’s always a certain amount of trial and error involved. You can’t expect to get everything right first time. Changes that have worked in the past might have no influence at all on another site. Basically you can’t afford to simply follow a generic blueprint.

If trial and error wasn’t a part of SEO, there’d be no need for analytics software or landing page testing. They would be rendered redundant. You’d get it right (or wrong) first time around, and that would be it. You wouldn’t need to tweak Meta, update content or review internal linking; everything would be complete.

Without testing though we wouldn’t get anywhere. Obviously as a SEO professional I’ve done my fair share of experimentation, because this is how I can offer better services to clients. If everything I had ever done worked first time, I’d be a bona fide SEO guru and top of Google for any term I wanted. But in reality it doesn’t work like that.
(more…)

We all do SEO to improve online visibility and reap the rewards of increased targeted traffic as a consequence. But it is an ever-evolving field. You constantly have to test, apply and reapply changes to help eke out those extra few. But understanding what works and how your site has developed over time can be critical – not only to future work, but to confidence too.

Obvious metrics, like rankings and traffic levels, are a good place to start.  These will help you to work out whether any dips are seasonal or if changes that have been made to the site have had a positive or even negative effect. All of this can prove vital in ensuring you stay on course to achieve your ultimate goal – search engine dominance.
(more…)

Webmaster Tools, just like a good analytics package, can help you to see your site through the eyes of a search engine. It won’t tell you when if your design is ugly or content is poor, but it will give you a heads up when errors start to creep in.

So, on the day that Bing released their revised Webmaster Tools programme, I thought it would be worth discussing some of the benefits for your site and SEO efforts.
(more…)

Analytics is like a spyglass into the world of your website’s users. It provides information that would otherwise be invisible and allows you to dissect where your site is succeeding and where it may be failing.

Here’s an example of how you might choose to use it. You’ve been targeting a keyword for months, you’ve got a decent ranking and appear to have some traffic coming through, but still you aren’t getting any conversions. What’s going wrong? What could be causing visitors to leave without making a purchase?

Well, this is where you dive into your analytics. First you look at the page’s bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave without visiting another page on the site); if the percentage is above 40% there is most likely an issue with the page. Maybe it’s the design, perhaps it is your content or it could just be that your keyword and page simply don’t tie in.
(more…)

When you’re doing SEO work it can feel like your ploughing a lonely furrow. You’re continuously updating your website and not always seeing an immediate return. It can be quite soul destroying, particularly where you aren’t receiving positive feedback.

You might only currently be measuring your Google rankings to determine effectiveness of SEO work (by no means a bad metric to use), but sometimes you need a little more. This is where a good analytics package can come in.

Whilst there is no substitute for gaining customers and conversions, an analytics package will give you a decent idea of where your site is improving and where work needs to be done. By following traffic through your site, you get an idea of what search terms are proving the most popular and why they might not be converting.
(more…)