Goals – What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Needs To Know.
November 26, 2013
When we think about goals, from the perspective of a search engine optimization company, what comes to mind?
Page one search results?
Increased traffic?
Reduced bounce rate?
All of these are worthy goals to be sure, and are probably the most obvious goals to set. However, there are a lot of goals out there which can help us measure the health and status of a website beyond just rankings and traffic.
Think about it; what good are page one rankings, increased traffic and a reduced bounce rate if no one is completing the checkout process and getting to the thank you page? How can you really know that your SEO campaign is effective?
If you work for a search engine optimization company, goals can help you to establish a baseline of how your campaigns are performing so you can establish genuine SEO successes or areas for improvement.
We’ve talked a bit before about Analytics goals on the SEOhaus blog, so if you are completely unfamiliar with them I would suggest reading that before continuing. For those who have read that blog already, who are already familiar with goals, or those cavalier daredevils with a laissez faire attitude that know nothing about goals but will choose to continue reading in spite of my warnings, today we are going to look at the “why” of goals in analytics and how they can be used as best practices by your search engine optimization company.
Destination Goal – Best served with sites that have a contact form confirmation or sales checkout confirmation… and a nice merlot.
The purpose of this goal is pretty obvious; it tells you every time someone gets to a certain page on your site. If you have a site that has a checkout page or a contact form, you absolutely must have this goal set up to track how many people get to the confirmation page. Now. Seriously. I’ll wait.
…
Back?
The obvious benefit to this is that you will be able to see the literal number of people who get to your confirmation page, but there is way more that you can learn from this goal.
As you can see, Analytics immediately tells us the number of goals completed (this is in the last month), the goal value (if you’ve included that data), the conversion rate and the abandonment rate. If you have different goals set up, it will also tell you how each of them are doing individually.
But wait… there’s more!
From the perspective of a search engine optimization company, ultimately we need to establish the value of our work and this goal can help us do that with the information found in “goal flow.”
As you can see, the majority of the successful conversions on this site came from Google. This information is vital during the slower months or if there are any bumps in an SEO campaign. If you’ve ever had a client say “I don’t know that it is worth it,” having this goal can help show them why it is.
Next week, I am going to look at the duration goal and the pages/screens per visit goals, and how you can use them to really develop your SEO campaign. In the meantime, if you have any questions please leave me a comment and I will get back to you.