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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
November 2004, Volume 3, Issue 7

Website conversion at iProspect.com.

You’ve Optimized Your Site; They Came; They Converted… Now What?

by Jason Dragonette, Search Marketing Specialist, iProspect

You’ve done it! You’ve spent lots of time and effort to optimize your website for organic search results on what should be the best traffic-driving keyword phrases available. Congratulations. Now it’s time to lean back, kick off your shoes and relax… but not for long. You’ll now need to evaluate which keywords have been leading to actual conversions.

After several weeks, you’ll begin to see your rankings in the search engines increase, your traffic from search properties rise, and hopefully, also notice a significant increase in conversions. That’s great; it’s exactly what you wanted, but there is still plenty of work to be done. Now it is time to analyze which of the hundreds (or potentially thousands) of keyword phrases you are targeting are directly leading to conversions. How do you do that? The answers can be found in your log file data.

The continuous collection of valuable traffic metrics is the key to determining the next steps to follow in your site’s optimization strategy. This point can’t be stressed enough: Without log data, there is no way to determine the value of your optimization efforts. Via your metrics, you will be able to determine which keyword phrases are directly leading to what number of conversions (be they ecommerce transactions, downloads, inquiries, or whatever). Now, let’s get to it.

To identify the top converting keyword phrases, sort your metrics by most conversions to identify the top 20-30 keyword phrases. Look for trends such as: For this exercise, depending on your business or product offerings, it may make sense to disregard branded keyword phrases, as there may be far less potential for competitors to rank on them, thereby already giving your site an upper hand in that arena. This allows you to focus on non-branded keyword phrases, which may present a greater opportunity for you to divert traffic from your would-be competitors and increase your conversions. For example, if you are the sole distributor of Super Duper Bouncy Bubbles, there is a high probability that the few people searching for your exact product’s name in the major search engines will end up on your site. However, if you sell more generic items, such as vintage tee shirts, there are many more potential customers as well as competitors out there. Your optimization efforts would best be utilized here.

By categorizing the non-branded keyword phrases into buckets or themes, you may begin to uncover a certain keyword phrase motif that you may use to your advantage. For example, say your company sells electronic audio equipment. Upon conducting an analysis of your log data, you notice that three or four of the top non-branded keyword phrases pertain to portable mp3 players. Such information obviously leads you to the conclusion that the “mp3 player” section of your website has been converting well and should undergo continued and more thorough optimization.

This evaluation process is really quite simple, yet very important and often overlooked. Again, it all starts with properly sorting and classifying your log file data and identifying potential patterns. Undergoing such an analysis once every quarter or so is not only healthy from an optimization standpoint, but also helps to identify visitor trends to your site, helping you to identify the more valuable or useful factions of your business.

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