How to track and analyze search engine optimization

Search engine optimizing refers to a number of improvements that can be done in order to gain more visibility online and be more accessible through search engines. Many things both on your website and outside of it factor into engine optimization, some of the main areas of focus are:

• search terms, search term conversions and search search term's results page
• referring websites: which is the linking page, which words form the link and what is its target page
• website structure: the important keywords should be used frequently in texts and the website has been built on a search engine friendly technique (avoid frames and if the website is built with Flash, choose a Flash producer that can deliver Flash pages that allow search engines to read them)
• other traffic sources and entry channels

Download Snoobi's search engine optimization guide here!

 

1. Chart the current status of your search terms

Open your Snoobi report and begin by analyzing how people are currently finding your website.

• Goals: Go through your goal pages and ensure that all important target pages and target functions have been made into goals. These include confirmation pages for various form submissions (contact requests, newsletter subscriptions, RSS feed subscriptions, logging in, creating a user account, enrolling into an event and recommending to a friend), downloading important documents (price lists, product catalogues, terms of order) and how much videos are viewed (also whether the video is viewed in its entirety or whether it's closed halfway through).

How to define goal pages to Snoobi

• Search terms: Go through your search terms in order to find the words or phrases that bring you conversions
  • Brainstorm other important keyword; which words do you want to be found with? Inspect the current list of organic search terms; which important keywords are missing?
  • AdWords ads can be used as a helpful tool, they help you try out different words and phrases in order to find the ones that get you the best results (most conversions).
  • Another tool suitable for keyword testing is Google's keyword tool, which is cost-free to use

Image 1. Target group report: make a search for all search terms and goals, you'll get a suitable analysis view covering both results pages and conversions

 

• Search term groups: Create search term groups out of the most important keywords. We recommend that you create at least two search term groups, one that contains brand related words only (including company name, the names of your own products and services) and one of non-brand related keywords (common nouns, general names, the problems that people seek solutions for).

How to create a search term group

Image 2. Search term groups let you compartmentalize keywords according to their topic

2. Use important keywords more on your website

Once you have established what keywords are important for your business, increase the frequency of these words on your website. A basic rule of thumb is to optimize no more than one word per page. Although you should repeat the word, don't overdo it; keep the text readable. Even optimized pages should be primarily written for its human visitors, because valuable and informative content encourages more people to link to it and links gives an important boost to the optimization.

Use your keywords in the following parts of a page:

• The page's URL address
  • A good content management system produces addresses out of intelligible words, not out of complicated parameters (such as pageid=35). If you have a CMS system that lets you choose the page address, name your pages so that the keyword that you're optimized is mentioned, e.g. www.company.com/budget-flight-and-hotel-packages-to-asia
• The page title (<title> -tag)
  • For example, if a page talks about your services, the page title can mention a key service (Budget flights and hotels to Asia)
• In the headers, sub headers and the actual body of the text
  • The most effective locations for your keyword is at the start of a page; both in the headers and in the body texts. Don't use business jargon; think of what word You would search for that matches the page's content.

   
3. Analyze the referring websites  

Use your Snoobi report to get an idea of which other site are linking to yours and giving you traffic.

• Find out which the linking page is. Snoobi show the precise address of the linking page, so that you can click yourself to the linking website in order to view what words or phrase actually spell out the link. The best solution for optimization is if the important keywords are part of the link text. Another consideration is that a linking page that touches on the same subject as your site is even more valuable than a linking page that talks about something completely different.
  • It's not ideal if all links lead to your front page. If possible, ask whoever is linking to make the link directly to the sub page that best fits the keyword.
  • Try to avoid that most or all referring website use your company's name in the link text. Most websites are already well optimized for the company name. Instead, if the links directs of a page about budget holidays, the optimization is best supported if the link text mentions the same topic, budgets holidays.
• When you send out PRs, company descriptions, blog articles or any other material, provide the publisher with instructions about which words should be linked and where.
• The higher the linking website is ranked in search engines (the better the result page), the bigger the impact of the link.

  

Image 3. Click on a referring website from the Main report - the sub report will display specific linking pages

 

4. Social media and other traffic sources

Analyze the remaining channels that produce visitors for your website. The same rules apply for these as for referring websites.

• Releasing a blog article or a new article on a popular website or in a popular social media profile will boost your search engine visibility. In all content that you create for the web, always remember the importance of the link text and its connection to the target page!

 

5. Have the optimization efforts payed off?

The best way to inspect your optimization results is to create a KPI report. Include the following metrics into your KPI report:

• visitors and conversions for the search term groups
• visitors and conversions for the referring websites
• visitors and conversions for social media

You'll find these metrics from the Target Group Report. Choose the Trends tab if you wish to analyze the search term group's optimization progress on a general scale. If you are also curious about individual keywords, you can include individual keywords from the Content tab.

How to create  KPI report »

How do I interpret the KPI report?

Compare how the visitor amounts and conversion amounts have developed over the past weeks or months. Optimization results don't show up right away. If the conversion percent for any keyword is high while its visitor numbers are low, continue optimizing that keyword in order to make the visitor numbers go up.