When you run a digital marketing agency, the #1 query you get is: if I contract with you for search engine optimization, can you guarantee a first place ranking on Google?

What this tells us is that there are SEO providers out there who make such promises. As a result, there are clients who may achieve a top ranking – but not much else to show for their investment in SEO. The words “guaranteed rankings and traffic” have tainted the reputation of the industry. One of the most common tactics is for the SEO provider to select your keywords for you. They will select non-competitive keywords which your potential customers are unlikely to use. This makes it easy for them to deliver a high search ranking based on those keywords, but this does not deliver quality traffic.

Companies who spend a lot of money raising their ranking from #2 to #1 may lose sight of conversion or dismiss pay-per-click campaigns that could help their bottom line. It’s possible to reach #1 and achieve little or no impact. It depends.

Search Engines Warn Against Guarantees

Google provides a very instructive set of guidelines on search marketing that every SEO client should read. They make one very clear statement: No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Although this section specifically warns about providers who claim to have special relationships with Google (such as access to knowledge of the ‘secret sauce’ behind Google’s search algorithms), the warning comes straight from the company who would know better than anyone that SEO guarantees are not feasible. For one thing, this would destroy the integrity of Google’s organic search model, which is the entire basis of their business success.

Rankings are Dynamic and Unstable

A reputable provider knows that search results for the same search term can vary from hour to hour, and from location to location. It depends on which search engine server is fulfilling your query at any point in time; whether you log in to your personalized Google account or some other account; or which city you’re in when you type the query. These factors change the order of results, so making guarantees based on uncontrollable circumstances does not make sense.

Rankings are the Wrong Metric for Business ROI

This is the most important thing to remember. The reason companies want high search rankings is to increase business. Rankings are a means to an end, not the end. Rankings alone do not increase traffic or convert traffic into business.

The most basic metric of SEO success is quality traffic. If an SEO campaign shows a marked increase in search engine traffic, that’s one part of the success. The other part is whether visitors stay on the site and spend time on product and services information, play with demos or watch videos. This means SEO has brought the right audience to the site.

Traffic is good, but converting traffic into visitors who take action is the ultimate success metric. Conversion could mean buying a product, or for non-eCommerce sites, it could mean signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a white paper. When visitors land on a company’s website, how easy is it to find information? Is the content clear and informative? Is the website easy to navigate? Does it provide calls to action in visible, logical places? Does the company know which phone calls or emails to the sales department come through search and which ones through traditional marketing?

SEO can drive traffic but not conversion once the visitor lands.

This is where Analytics come into play. An SEO provider will always install analytics to determine where the traffic is coming from, which were the most popular search terms and so on. Analytics can also monitor user behavior on a website: which pages were most popular, how long did visitors spend on each page, when they abandoned the site and on which page. This helps determine how a website could be improved for better conversion. A website optimized for conversion is also part of the business equation. A high search ranking definitely helps, but by itself will not convert business for you.

So What’s a Reasonable Promise?

A good digital marketing provider will focus on increasing a client’s business. This means taking a consultative approach that is broader than merely SEO. Typically this means an audit of the client’s existing online presence that includes search, website effectiveness, social media, and even offline mediums that drive visitors to the website. This will generate recommendations which may include content strategy, website optimization, or a social media strategy. This takes a lot more work than just promising to submit a client’s website to all the search engines.

A client may not have the budget to implement all the recommendations, but the provider will be able to advise which components are the most critical.

The other factor is time. There will always be components that only the client can implement. This includes tasks such as freshening content and images, developing marketing content specific to the business, regular blog posts, and setting up offline mechanisms for tracking (different phone numbers for web queries and print ad queries is a good example). Fresh content helps boost search engine rankings; this is why regular blog posts are important. Social media also requires real commitment from the client. But a client may not have the staff or time to do this, so again, a good provider will explain how the various components impact the success of the plan and help the client prioritize.

Given factors such as: competing SEO campaigns, changing search algorithms, client resources and/or ability to implement, the only guarantee a digital marketing agency can give a client is: to provide the best advice possible for using the Internet to increase traffic and improve business.

Collecting analytics data about your site visitors is a good thing. The theory behind collecting information is that if you have some sensible data, you can better plan when executing business objectives. But, like most good things, there’s a catch.

You need a way of testing all this wonderful data against your theories of what works. If you don’t, you will be left with a big blob of information that doesn’t do your organization much good except supply icing for colourful reports.

For example, how useful is it for you to know that, on average, your website visitors spend 40 seconds on your landing page?

Or, what intelligence do you get from knowing that your customers drop out at the third step of a registration process on your site?

You can get all of this data from analytics, but so what? How does that translate into implementing changes to your site to help achieve results? If only there was a way to use this data to help achieve business objectives…

Enter Optimizer.

It’s all about testing. No, I am not talking about a 100 question multiple choice exam. Think simpler. Think kindergarten: A or B questions. With Optimizer, you can test two different scenarios against each other to see how your visitors react (split testing) and use that raw data to see which scenario works better. It’s so simple that it makes achieving business objectives a breeze. And the best part is that you can test anything: content, call to actions, graphical elements, even user interface concepts.

Let’s take one of our previous raw data examples and see how Optimizer can help. Let’s say your customers are dropping out on the third step of your registration process and you want to find out why.

You have two theories as to why they are leaving:

#1) You are asking them for too much private information.

#2) The third step is too long and the user gets bored and leaves.

Let’s say you decide to test theory #1: you are asking too much private information (maybe you are collecting credit card data to verify someone’s age). You decide that this step is not necessary and you remove the credit card details and run a split test (some visitors go through the original registration process while some go through the modified version). You let this experiment run for a while and then review the results. The version of your site which successfully converts more visitors into registrants is the more optimized site.

Congratulations, you just ran your first simple split test and achieved a business objective: getting more registrations.

Of course, real life optimizations can be far more complex. You can run multivariate tests to see how several versions of a site perform and you can make the tests more efficient by testing multiple elements simultaneously. For time sensitive projects (such as a product launch) this type of testing becomes crucial as the website success is a function of time. By running split tests, you reduce the time it takes to discover the most optimized configuration for your site.

Running proper test campaigns takes knowledge, a good grasp of usability and a well defined business objective. Next time you are pouring over your analytics data, think about how your site is meeting your business objectives and consider how a test campaign can help you meet your goals.

Image Credit: brockvicky/cc

Instead of searching for brand new keywords to compete for, the easiest way to increase your traffic is to work with keywords you are already ranking well for on search engines.

To get started, you will need a Google Analytics and a Google Webmasters account that has a least of month of data for you to examine. If you have e-commerce tracking or conversion goal tracking already set up, then it will be easy to identify the best keywords to target for search engine optimization. For example, here at SmarttNet we track our website’s lead generation with two Google Analytics conversion goals that are triggered whenever somebody completes our Contact Us form and Website Consultation form.

To see which keywords are sending you quality traffic, open your Google Analytics account and navigate to the keywords report under the Traffic Sources menu. The initial keywords report will show the top 10 keywords that sent you the most traffic in the last month. Now, I want you to choose 3 keywords in this report that we will focus on for search engine optimization (if you have goals setup, you can use the Goal Set 1, Goal Set 2, etc. to see which keywords are generating the most leads). For our website, I’ll choose three keywords that send our website quality traffic.

Next, I want you to open your Google Webmasters account. On the Webmaster dashboard you will see a list of your website’s most popular search queries. Click on the “More » ” link to view the entire search queries report. Here you will find some keyword data that will be very useful in analyzing how much of an increase in traffic and leads you can generate by optimizing your website better for these keywords. For the 3 keywords I choose this is the keywords impressions data provided:

As you can see, we are only realizing a small portion of the potential traffic these keywords could be sending us. By focusing our search engine optimization on these three keywords which are already sending us quality, converting traffic we can easily increase our website’s lead generation. Even small, incremental increases in our search engine rank for these quality keywords would result in an increase in our traffic. The question, is how much more traffic would a slightly higher rank result in? To answer this question, we have some actual data from a 2006 study that analyzed 36 million queries on AOL’s search engine:

Source: Predictive Marketing

This click-tracking study provides useful data to gain a rough idea of how  much more traffic we can expect from an increase in ranking for each keyword. Keep in mind that this study focus strictly on clicks on the organic search engine results page (SERP) and that about 10-15% of people will click on Google’s Adwords ads.

The easiest way to increase your traffic is to modify your Title Tags and Meta Description Tags to more prominently feature your keywords on the search engine results page. In the example above, the click-through (CTR) for keyword #2 is much lower than the other two keywords and the reason for this is that the keywords text is not nearly as prominently displayed in search engine results page (description/title) as they are for competitor’s websites.

Once you’ve made the basic modifications to your Titles Tags and Meta Descriptions Tags, the next step would be to create new content around these keywords and build some incoming links with the keywords in the link anchor text.

By focusing your search engine optimization and link building resources on high quality keywords that you are already ranking for, you can easily calculate the potential increase in traffic and lead generation by using the click distribution chart above. Rather than guessing, now you can analyze all the keywords currently sending you traffic and easily cherry pick the most valuable keywords that should be the target of your next search engine optimization campaign.

The key to tracking different PPC Ad Campaigns is Google’s URL Builder. Using this handy tool, you can track the conversions and return on investment from your online advertising spending.

To get started, here is how to use Google’s URL Builder for the most common PPC Ad Platforms:

1. How To Track Your MSN adCenter PPC Campaigns:

If you leave your MSN adCenter ad untagged, then your paid traffic will be indistinguishable from your organic traffic from MSN and Bing. To create custom tags for your Microsoft adCenter URLs, enter the information below into Google URL Builder:

1. Campaign Source: bing
2. Campaign Medium: cpc
3. Campaign Term: {QueryString}
(this is a custom tag that Microsoft Adcenter supports for tracking keywords )
4. Campaign Content: {AdID}
(this is another custom tag unique to Adcenter for individual ad tracking)
5. Campaign Name: {OrderItemID}
(this imports your Ad Group ID from Microsoft Adcenter or choose a custom campaign name)

Plug this data into Google’s URL Builder and you should get something like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=ppc&utm_term={QueryString}&utm_content={AdID}&utm_campaign={OrderItemID}

Notice that the Google URL Builder may converts the “{” and “}” characters  to character string “%7B” and “%7D”. I’d recommend modifying the URL so that the “{” and “}” characters are intact. Now, login into your Microsoft Adcenter account and ad this custom URL to each individual ad as the landing page URL.

2. How To Track Your Yahoo Search Marketing PPC Campaigns:

Tracking your Yahoo Search Marketing Ads is very similar to the previous example with Microsoft Adcenter. Again, what you need to do is create custom tags for your individual Yahoo Ad Campaigns:

1. Campaign Source: yahoo
2. Campaign Medium: cpc
3. Campaign Term: {OVKEY}
   (Yahoo’s custom tag for tracking keywords)
4. Campaign Content: {OVADID}
   (Yahoo’s custom tag for individual ad tracking)
   
5. Campaign Name: {OVCAMPGID}
   (Yahoo’s custom tag for campaign ID or choose a custom campaign name)

Plug this data into Google’s URL Builder and you should get something like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}

Now you will need to verify that Yahoo’s custom URL tagging (which only works with Yahoo! Web Analytics) is disabled by going to the Administration tab and clicking on Tracking URLs. Set Tracking URLs to OFF and save your changes. This will ensure that your URLs will not be double tagged. Next, in your Yahoo PPC campaign manager, you will need to enter this custom URL for each individual ad in your PPC campaign as the landing page URL.

3. How To Track Your Facebook Ad Campaigns:

With Facebook’s growing influence in online advertising, running PPC campaigns on the Facebook platform can be very lucrative for certain businesses. If you don’t set up a custom URL for your Facebook Ads then they will appear in your Google Analytics data in a similar fashion to clicks from your Facebook Page or links posted on Facebook. That’s not very helpful if you’re trying to track return on investment (ROI), which is especially important for Facebook Ads which can be a goldmine for some businesses and a moneypit for others.

1. Campaign Source: facebook
2. Campaign Medium: cpc
3. Campaign Term: (here can you place your targeted keywords)
4. Campaign Content: (this can help you differentiate your ads if you’re running multiple ads)
5. Campaign Name: (choose a custom campaign name)

You completed URL will look something like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=seo&utm_content=ad1&utm_campaign=facebook-seo

Next, enter this information as the landing page for your individual Facebook Ad ads and campaigns and you won’t have to rely anymore on the mediocre analytics provided by Facebook Insights.

Conclusion

I highly recommend to customers that are currently using Google Adwords to try out these other platforms. While the search volumes are nowhere near Google’s, the cost-per-click is often much lower and the advertising competition is less intense. This can make it much easier to convert your paid traffic spending into conversions that a solid return for each dollar spent.

Now, with custom tracking you can see for yourself if these platforms are worth your advertising dollars by measuring your exact return on investment in Google Analytics.

To get started, you can access the Filter Manager in Google Analytics by clicking on “Analytics Settings” in the top left corner of your browser window. From the Analytics Settings page, click on “Filter Manager” in the bottom right. In the Filter Manager you can create a new filter by clicking on “+ Add Filter” link on top right of the “Existing Filters” table.

Google Analytics Filters

#1 – Exclude Internal Address Filter

To make your statistical data as accurate as possible, you will probably want to exclude traffic from within your company. At the very least, you should exclude the IP of the webmaster and the employees who do the editing on your pages. You can easily do this by excluding the entire IP address range of your company’s network. If you don’t know your IP address, use What Is My Ip?. Once you have your IP address handy, Google has created a tool to exclude traffic from a range of IP addresses. Simply cut and paste the code Google gives you into the IP address box as shown below.

#2 – All Lowercase Only Filter

A problem in Google Analytics is that it is not case-sensitive, so it will track a page differently depending on how it is typed into the browser. For example, if your website’s main page is www.website.com/index.html, Analytics will track www.website.com/Index.html or www.website.com/index.Html as different pages. This can easily complicate the analysis of your website’s traffic. To fix this problem, you can add a very easy filter.

From the Add Filter Page again, select “Custom Filter” from the Filter Type dropdown menu. Select Lowercase from the radio buttons and then for the “Filter Field” dropdown menu select “Request URI”

#3 Full Referral URL Filter

Another small problem in the basic setup of Google Analytics is that it shortens the website URLs in the referring traffic results. This can make it difficult to find the exact page on the website that is referring you traffic. To solve this problem, you will need a filter that allows the display of the full website URL in the Visits section of Google Analytics.

To do this, create a new filter called “Full Referral URL” and then from the “Filter Type” dropdown menu choose “Custom Filter” (you can also refer to graphic below to see how to input the information). Next, select the “Advanced” radio button.  In the “Field A > Extract A” menu select “Referral” from the dropdown menu and enter (.*) in the text field, which tells Analytics to select the entire URL. For the “Field B > Extract B” menu you can leave the dropdown menu and text field empty.

Next, from the “Output To > Constructor” menu select “User Defined” from the dropdown menu and enter “$A1″ in the text field. For the radio buttons below, in “Field A Required” select the Yes radio button, in “Field B Required” select the No radio button, in “Override Output Field” select the Yes radio button and in “Case Sensitive” select the No radio button.  Save the new Filter Profile and you’re done.

There you have it, three Google Analytics filter profiles that will make your website statistics more accurate. I recommend that you quickly add these filter profiles whenever you create a new Google Analytics account. To learn more about advanced features in Google Analytics, you can download our latest Google Analytics White Paper.

Download a copy (below) to learn how to set up a wide range of useful goals ranging from tracking newsletter signups, social media bookmarking to tracking the completion of an online sales process. The goal conversions outlined in the white paper are intended for websites of all sorts, including:

• Brand Awareness and Engagement Website: For brochure-style websites that don’t directly sell products or generates leads for your business.
• Lead Generating Website: For websites where you want visitors to contact you for further information about your products and services.
• E-commerce Sales Website: For online E-commerce stores where you want to track visitor behavior and analyze how they navigate through the online sales process.

The reason why every website with Google Analytics needs conversion goals is that they allow you measure which search engine keywords and external traffic sources are providing traffic that is converting. They also provide insight into which landing pages and important content on your website is attracting the visitors that are using your website in a way that achieves your business goals.

With the actionable insights provided by well set goals, you can steadily improve the user experience for your visitors while making your website a more effective marketing tool for your business. This white paper provides step-by-step instructions to set up conversion goals in Google Analytics, and provides these other important tips on how to improve the effectiveness of your analytics data:

• How to filter traffic internal traffic from your company.
• How to create a visual sales funnel to track the sales process.
• How to create virtual pageviews for difficult-to-track goals that require JavaScript.

Download a copy of the white paper in PDF format here: Google Analytics White Paper