How to Show SEO Value
This next post is for fellow SEO consultants, freelancers and SEO service providers. Search engine optimization value comes in many different shapes and sizes it depends on the client and how they will respond to that value. I think hiccups occur and relationships are torn when people depend on the entire success of their company from a search engine optimization campaign that is about to start. SEO is a seed that when planted needs constant watering in order to grow over the long term. Try exploring the value of SEO in a different fashion.
Analytics
By definition the process of search engine optimization is not to increase sales although that is the ultimate goal. SEO is supposed to bring more traffic to your site. Whether the horse wants to drink the water is whole other story. Look at your analytics information and take a look to see if you are receiving any more visitors. Look at all aspects not just the unique visitors. Look at entrance keywords and how people are finding you. Examine the new keywords that are dropping visitors to certain internal web pages.
Google Webmaster Tools
Install Google Webmaster tools so you can see the physical links being created pointing directly at your website. Link building is a very important part of creating a solid search marketing campaign and in order to have visitors finding your web site you are going to have to create some links. Google Webmaster Tools will give you a nice solid breakdown of all the links that are pointing to your site which is a very important area to look at when trying to determine the value of your search marketing spend.
Search Results
Look at the search results from time to time in order to see what is making its way there for your company name can give you some insight as well. If you are taking an aggressive search marketing approach you will most likely start to see the search results for your company name start to fill up nicely. Looking at this takes time depending on how much information you are putting out there but it will take time to see this area fill up.
Search engine optimization is not all about sales. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink so if your service or product stinks people are not going to want to buy anything.
25 Responses to “How to Show SEO Value”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
very good said. I think that when we make SEO it is very importnant to understand that we don’t make it for unusefull traffic but for targeted once – keywords. Some people think that when they have a lot of visitors it works. I don’t think so. In my opinion we have to evaluate not the traffic (organic) but the quality of traffic – Google Analytics!
Regards
totally agree with your sayings. All these tools are very useful in order to create a seo plan.Analytics and link bulding in combination with on page seo and constant monitoring of your seo efforts can have truly valuable results
Thanks Nikos for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Merry Christmas!
Nick
Nick,
While technically there is no debating your point that SEO is about bringing more traffic to a site, an SEO engagement may be more successful if broader metrics are monitored. Many clients require assistance in connecting the dots between SEO and an increase in sales. Further, an SEO consultant can really enhance their status if they assist a client in improving conversion rates of SEO traffic. However, as you point out, most SEO engagements are limited to driving traffic to a site.
Thanks Nick, a great article.
Have a great Christmas!
being a webmaster of a company i understand that what exactly a company from a SEO professional. In my study more than 80% of the company looks after the traffic whether they are relevent or targetted customers, they are not bother about that. It means nothing that you are bringing 100 odd traffic but getting only 1 conversion, but its more worthy to bring 50 targetted visitor and atleast get 10-11 conversion. But its not good thing that now a days most of the company are taking advantage of this.
Thanks everyone for reading and the comments!
I totally agree with your perspective. I continue hearing stories from business owners who think that SEO is a one-time instant marketing campaign. I am glad to see that news is getting out that SEO requires ongoing effort.
Hi Sherman,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts! SEO is certainly an ongoing race!
Take Care,
Nick
We are new to the online community therefore SEO and the various tools are all new to us. I like using Google Analytics but don’t really know how to interprete some of the data. I’ve also installed the SeoQuake utility which again is helpful but I don’t know which numbers are the most important to target.
We’ve been online since 11/6 and have only had 596 visits with 241 of them being new visits. The Alexa Rank started off at over 56 million and is now at 1.7 million, which I think is pretty good for the time. Are we moving in the right direction?
Some very nice ideas. It would be nice to hear you expand on how SEO can bring value to a company’s website. For example, measurability in terms of income. Without income it’s a fruitless exercise and without a means to measure this it makes targeting a lot harder. Personally I use a combination of internal company reports, goal setting and advanced segmentation in Google Analytics – coming close to, but never quite making it an exact science.
I agree you need SEO to get any traffic at all – Bad SEO and your keywords are lost in oblivion. I check which searches people perform when coming to my site and mark them down .
A great site name and accurate page names goes a long way .
Don`t forget to make sure before you start that the product is a top seller or targeted niche with no competitors if possible.
I totally agree Nick – well said! SEO is the beginning of an ongoing process – it is not the whole solution.
I would like to know how you experts use your Google Webmaster top search queries. Is it me or is Google Webmasters a week behind in the stats given?
This is always such a contentious matter.
On the one hand, lots of poor promoters send the wrong prospects, or simply don’t understand to whom they are supposed to be targeting and promoting. That’s bad SEO, and really, if you aren’t increasing the sales, then you’re probably failing to justify the increase in overheads in hiring an SEO.
However, on the flip-side, there are some products that are simply poor, and not going to sell well regardless of how well you promote them. Products where competitors are widely known to have better deals, or simply where the product is unconvincing or unappealing. Not all SEOs have the ability to turn those clients away unless they are willing to listen about marketing, not just advertising.
One thing you should really look at though is whether you are increasing the conversion rate. i.e. if the site gets only 300 visitors a month when you start, and averages 3 sales a month (a 1% conversion rate) then you should definitely not see a decline in that rate unless your targeting is poor, and you are sending poorly prequalified leads (this means poor keyword choices).
At the end of the day, getting traffic to a site is as easy as running an advertising banner across the web with ‘click here for free beer/pizza/money” on it. Of course, such a banner campaign would be costly and useless in increasing sales, and only negatively brand the end site as a disappointment for not providing free beer/pizza/money.
The SEO must be different to that if he isn’t selling snake-oil. He needs to be constantly improving the quality, not just quantity of referred traffic.
If you send traffic that isn’t converting, then either you got the wrong traffic, or maybe you should have turned that client away. He quite rightly *is* going to blame the SEO for all those promises of more sales not coming true.
If you could E-mail me with a few tips on how made your blog look this excellent,I would be thankful.
i am with you Nick, you talk about the good topics which is still in confusing for many people about seo and real fact of seo.
thank for shearing the awesome post.
Thanks Nick for reminding me that SEO is an ongoing effort and I should need to track the results. I’m using WordPress for my blog and Google Analytics is not usable for WordPress because it also has its own tracking results. At the moment, I only can track how many person visiting my blog everyday. But I’m not able to assess the quality of the traffic. Keywords are very very important. I need to get some kind of tool such as the Micro niche Finder to help me to choose the appropriate keywords for my messages.
I’m still very new, everything is still at the learning stage for me.
Hope this platform allows me to share ideas and experiences with like-minded people here
I disagree to some extent with saying SEO is not about sales. There are certainly other elements that affect sales (product, price, sales presentation, reputation etc etc) but we have a duty to attract meaningful traffic/potential buyers – so we have to take responsibility for the ‘quality’ of the visitors which impacts sales
It is a catch-22 situation.
You need to be popular to SEO your site.
If you are popular, you don’t need SEO.
So, don’t focus on SEO, focus on popularity and traffic.
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts everyone!
Take Care!
Nick
We tried a lot of SEO-advices. You only reach more traffic by combination of SEO AND content. If your visitors dont´t trust you- thy´ll never come back.
Hi Nick
i agree with you that SEO is not all about sales. Thanks for sharing yours views.
Nice post. Couldn’t agree more. Thanks for sharing. One observation: “you can bring a horse to the water but you can’t make him drink” – you can: just feed him salt. I always think about what I can use as “salt”
Hi NicP,
Thanks for reading and your comment! Salt indeed!