In the first six weeks after your site’s SEO is first implemented, the information will start flowing in. This stage gives a business time to relax and catch up. It also is the time to prepare for the routines you will need for the rest of your site’s life.
The initial goal for most businesses in approaching their search engine optimisation is to rank for their chosen keywords. Once this goal is achieved, your SEO plan can become more subtly tuned to your business goals. Rankings may bring your site traffic, but they will not necessarily lead site users to do what you want them to do. A more finely-tuned SEO plan will bring the right users to the right pages.
Making the most of your rankings requires an understanding of what your site users are doing. In the first weeks after your site’s optimisation is implemented, you can lay out a plan for analysing your site users’ behaviour. It is usually best to have your SEO consultant’s advice at this stage, as this analysis will give you an idea of the small changes you need to make to your SEO strategy. Talk to us at SEO Consult about the long-term process your site’s search engine optimisation should take.
Ideally, when you analyse the behaviour of users on your site, you will see your users follow the paths you have planned for them. In the process of developing and optimising your site, you will have plotted out the paths you want your users to take. For example, you may have plotted that you want new users to enter through the homepage, which they will have found with your main keywords, browse your main sell page, then click through to your registration page and exit from there. This is just one of the paths available through your site.
Your statistics will tell you where your users go, how long they spend on each page, and importantly where they exit your site. If you have aimed for new users to behave in the way described above and they tracked another path, your plans have gone slightly awry. This doesn’t necessarily mean disaster. Often, companies who discover users behaving in an unpredicted way find this has opened up unexpected avenues for their site. If your site relies on users behaving in a certain way, however, you need to discover what went wrong.
Analysis of your users’ behaviour on your site needs to involve how they entered the site, their paths, time spent on each page, and exit points. Comparison of keywords on these paths can be helpful in informing you of what’s going on in your users’ minds. Tracking the referrer points is a big part of this, so that you can track which keywords are feeding users onto which paths.
Once you know how your users behave, you can make changes that will redirect their behaviour. Often, it is the period just after initial optimisation that counts most to a business, as it allows the search engine optimisation plan of a site to be fine-tuned to best effect. Consulting with your SEO firm at this point gives you access to valuable tools for user analysis.
Related posts:
- An SEO Health Check
- Site Metrics: The Difference Between Bounces and Exits
- Removing the barriers to great traffic flow
- SEO: Analyse This
- Monitoring Entry And Exit Pages
Tags: search engine optimisation advice, Search Engine Optimisation Tips, seo advice, SEO Tips, SEO Usability
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this article does a nice job highlighting the importance of being data driven to be successful with SEO. without having a solid analytic platformed pre-installed, it will be almost impossible to prove value as an SEO. Keep up the good work.