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Step 5: SEO and eCommerce Tracking and Analysis

 

Because of the very nature of SEO, it can be hard to determine if the techniques are actually working or not. It's a process that goes on behind the scenes. Tracking results before and after your campaign will allow you to gauge the effectiveness of your different techniques. If some are working extremely well and others are proving ineffective, you can simply adjust your strategy to compensate.

There are plenty of tracking programs that will allow you to view the statistic of your website. Most hosting services provide free access to analysis tools, although they're sometimes very limited. Alternatively, Google provides a free tracking and analysis tool called Google Analytics. By pasting a code into the HTML of your website you can view incoming traffic, page views, search phrases, individual pages viewed and much more.

At a basic level, you should track 3 things:

1. Rankings – The goal of SEO is to get your content to rank for targeted keywords. You should take a baseline reading before you engage in SEO and then track your site’s rankings for the desired keywords on a monthly basis to measure the progress you are making.
2. Website visits – Rankings are only a means to an end. Your SEO should be driving traffic to your site. Google Analytics allows you to measure traffic generated by specific keywords, and this is where you can really gauge the effectiveness of your campaign.
3. Sales by keyword – Just as rankings are only a means to an end, visits are only valuable if the visitor actually buys something. Google Analytics allows you to track the dollar sales of visitors who entered by searching on a specific keyword, and this is the true measure of your eCommerce SEO success.

One thing to keep in mind when tracking your SEO progress is that SEO takes time. Don’t expect instant results, or you will surely be disappointed.

Conclusion to SEO and eCommerce

That last sentence really sums up the process of SEO: it takes time. You can't expect everything to happen at once. Sometimes it takes months to see results; it all depends on the subject of your eCommerce site and what keywords you're using.

The success of websites today all comes down to how well they rank in search engines. In an age when nearly nobody takes the time to remember specific website URLs, it makes no sense to try to go in that direction. Even if I know I want to go to a specific tire website for my snow tires, I'll still just type in “snow tires” and see where that takes me. It's the mindset of the Internet using population, and there's no way to fight that.

SEO takes time, yes. It takes dedication and a working knowledge of how these systems work. There's a lot of trial and error involved for first time optimizers, and if you want to take care of your site's SEO then you are going to have to expect that.

However, when implemented correctly into a strong website, SEO has the power to dramatically boost incoming traffic, which subsequently leads to higher conversions and ultimately more product sales for you. Remember the numbers: if one visitor out of every 50 buys a product from your site, you want to focus on bringing in more visitors. Get 10, 20 times that number of visits and you'll start to notice a real difference in your bottom line. That's the freedom that you can get from proper SEO.

SEO can feasibly be done by anybody with a computer. That doesn't mean it will be effective though. Our goal is effective SEO that actually shows results, conducted by a team of experienced and knowledgeable search engine optimizers.