In order to gauge how effective a thorough prospective SEO implementation will be for your website, it is beneficial for us to understand existing website performance. We can do this through a variety of means. If you have Google Analytics installed on your site, we will request access to it. Google Analytics is a powerful, free software that gives webmasters powerful insight into how visitors find you, what pages they look at on your site, how long they stay on your site, what geographies they come from and much much more. By reviewing Analytics, we can often determine which pages and keywords are already popular. We can also determine which keywords result in low time on site and high bounce rates (leave after visiting only one page).
If you do not have Google Analytics, there are other practical ways to get an understanding of performance. Some good questions to ask when attempting to understand present website performance are: Do you receive inquiries from your website? Have you ever surveyed prospective customers and asked them how they found out about you? When you try to search for company online how hard is it to find you? Have previous Internet Marketing consultants done anything for you? Have you experimented with Google Adwords?
Don't worry. If you have never done anything to understand your website's performance we can certainly help you out. Here are a few ways in which Corporate Conversions assists owners in understanding their site's performance:
- Install Google Analytics tracking code.
- Setup "Goals" in Google Analytics to track conversions. In other words, track when visitors fill out a contact form and then trace the initial source of the inquiry (ex. search engine, referral link, direct hit, etc.)
- Setup a "test" Google Adwords campaign. We have often found that spending a few hundred dollars on a Google Adwords campaign can give us a great deal of data related to what prospective keywords drive quality traffic and conversions to your site.
- Perform an SEO Competition Analysis by surveying the strenght of your top online competitors. This is a very good way to understand how difficult it will be to get ranked in the top organic results of Google for certain desirable keywords and phrases. Depending on the strength of the competition and your budget we often recommend going after the "second tier" of valuable keywords or pursuing hits based on long-tail keywords instead of generic phrases.
- Establish your business on important prominent local directories. This method is especially critical if your business is limited to a specific city or geography. Corporate Conversions maintains an authoritative list of the top local directories and has implemented a best practices methodology of listing our clients' sites.
The bottom line is that it is absolutely essential to establish a baseline website analysis prior to any SEO engagement. It is critical to us to impart on our prospective clients where they are today so that they can accurately follow the progress that we will make for them going forward.