Beyond SEO: Using Your Web Data for Business Intelligence
Do you already have some SEO ("Search Engine Optimization") set up on your website? Have you and your team already gone through the exercise of selecting your company's website SEO keywords? Have you signed up for a marketing paid adwords campaign?
That's great! And... Now what? What are you doing with the data being generated by user searches and your website? If you're not analyzing it for business intelligence, then you're probably walking past gold at your feet.
"I Don't Have Time"
In our experience, most business owners and managers have their hands full with the significant challenge of running their business. If the website works, if the paid adwords seem to be keeping the site high enough in the search engine results, they're content. They have other things to worry about, and so they move on, not realizing what the data can tell them their business.
The steep learning curve needed in order to analyze the data and understand its significance in business terms prevents many from seeing what they're missing – the website traffic data can be used to increase revenue, cut costs, and reduce risk.
Quick Start Tips for Website Business Analysis
The missing element in most SEO efforts is the business and technology analysis loop to analyze the data in terms of its business significance, and incorporate it into business planning and operations.
If you're not sure about the significance of the SEO numbers to your business, or if you're not sure what to do next, the following analysis questions should give you a quick start to using your website data for business intelligence.
- What did your website analytics baseline profile look like?
- How did you select the initial keywords and phrases for your SEO plan?
- What did you learn from that exercise?
- What were the search results for the initial keywords and phrases you selected?
- Do the results confirm your assumptions?
- Were the initial search results on-target for your business? Or were the other websites that came up with yours on the search results page about something completely unrelated to your business, or worse? (For example, you don't want your business website surrounded by a bunch of porn sites in the search engine results!)
- Do your keywords have a high search volume on Google, or low? Does the volume change over time? Is there a seasonal pattern to your site traffic?
- Is there someone on your website team responsible for checking the web visitor stats against the baseline on a regular basis? How often? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
- Are they communicating their findings with the Business Analysts? With Management? With the Marketing and Advertising Departments? Research and Product Development? IT? The Lawyers? The Technical Writers?
- Have the baseline search results changed? If yes, how much? Where?
- Are the keywords still relevant to your business? How do the search results compare to the first ones you set up?
- Do you update the keywords when you add new products or services, or when there are other changes in the company?
- Are you systematically reinforcing your keywords when new content is added to the site?
- Does your company maintain a "Website Language Style Guide" that includes the current keywords so everyone who is contributing to the site reinforces the keywords and phrases in their writing? The search engines tend to deprecate the keywords located at the top of your web page source code. It is the consistent use of the keywords in the page Title, Description, Heading 1, and first paragraph text that is critical to successfully driving the site higher in the search results. It's all about targeted language content.
- Are you using your keywords and phrases consistently throughout your business?
- Are the keywords actually bringing visitors into your site?
- What other keywords and phrases are bringing them in? What is the search volume for these words in Google? What are their search results?
- Are your visitors coming in from links on other sites? Do you regularly ask your vendors and clients to give you a link on their site? Are you using any social media that's resulting in increased site traffic?
- Do your visitors stay? Or do they leave as soon as they come in?
- Do they come back?
- Do they become customers?
- Is there any other useful information in your visitor statistics, such as ideas for new products, or evidence of a different customer base than you've targeted?
- Are you using Google Trends or Keyword Tool for keyword research, or for gaining insight into social trends?
- In other words: Are you using the data from your website and online searches for business intelligence and competitive advantage?
Use Your Web Statistics for Business Analysis, Planning, and Operations
Make sure all of your business and operations departments have access to the data, in order to analyze it according to their own requirements, in their own language. Upper management should review the analyses and recommendations, and prioritize time and resources and planning accordingly. This will allow you to set up the continuous improvement process loop to integrate your website with the rest of your business for true competitive advantage and website ROI.
Contact Us
Whether you want to increase your ranking in the "organic", search engine results, or you need to evaluate the ROI of your paid adword campaigns, please Contact Us. Call (412) 422-1611. We are on Eastern time.
We have years of experience helping our clients to increase sales with organic SEO and SEM techniques, while saving huge amounts of money on wasted paid adword campaigns and other SEO marketing scams. It's not rocket science. It's just learning how to interpret the technical results in terms of business.
More SEO Information
- Understanding SEO Basics,
by Mary Ecsedy
Provides an overview of Search Engine Optimization, including a Basic SEO Checklist. - What's a "bot"?, by Mary
Ecsedy
aka "spiders", "crawlers", etc. - Introduction to
Search Engine Optimization ("SEO") – Carnegie
Mellon University Lecture Notes, by Mary Ecsedy
This is Mary's SEO presentation from her SEO lecture on 10/12/2009 at Carnegie Mellon University.
