We all know that SEO for competitive keywords is tough. Given the tough competition, it’s too bad that many SEO campaigns fail because the proper ROI parameters have not been set. Many businesses simply focus too much on the actual nuts and bolts work of SEO, and they do not give proper attention to evaluating the campaign results. Read on for some tips on how to make sure you maximize your SEO campaign ROI.
Flying Blind is for Bats
Not for people running SEO campaigns. You would be shocked to know how many people spend tons of dough on sites that don’t have traffic analytics. This is nuts. You will need to be aware of where your traffic is coming from. How many are coming from search engines? How many from referral sites? You also have to know which keywords are performing and that means you have to track how much time people are on the site. You can’t get a good ROI if you don’t track, study and understand your website traffic.
Non-Branded Traffic Is the Name of the Game
Branded traffic is that where the visitors type in your domain name, or use Google to find a variation of a business name they already are familiar with. If there is a freelance writer named Bob Smith in Cleveland, and someone typed bob smith writer in Google to find him, that would be a branded visit. These are important visitors, but SEO is about getting lots of non-branded traffic. A potential site visitor who finds the website in Google by typing freelance writer in Cleveland, is doing a non-branded visit. This is SEO as it was meant to be. If your site can pick up non-branded traffic like that, you will be doing well.
Conversion is Everything
People spend ridiculous amounts of money on getting people to their site. Then they forget about making the visit pleasant once the visitors are there. A normal rate of conversion is about 1-3%. The difference between 1 and 3 can make or break your ROI for your SEO campaign. You need to really understand where your traffic is going on the site and why they are leaving. Fine tune the site according to what you learn in your analysis.