[Enthused]

I'm doing my best to learn about seo since i think all web developers should know a thing or two about it these days. Ive been talking to a few people just to try and get an overall idea of what they do and i do understand the basics.

I found that they all use some sort of tool do produce reports on the websites.

Is there any need for these tools and if so what are the best tools? And i don't just mead keyword tools.

Thanks in advance

[BlueDreamer]

Some sort of "ROI" software for tracking your success targets, eg sales/conversions/signups etc, is always very useful.

Done properly, "SEO" is all about improving your sites performance, so you need a way to measure any improvements.

ROI/tracking software would also be useful for tracking the effectiveness of you marketing efforts, such as advertising, building backlinks and so on.

[bocaj]

It depends what kind of site you have, and what the objectives are.

Subscription services would need to track different metrics to a publishing service.

Say you have a web host, some basic metrics you'd want to follow would probably be:

Bounce
Clickthrough
Sign up ratio
Customer Acquisition Rate
Customer Acquisition Costs
Customer Acquisition Ratio (ROI?)

etc. etc.

Normally a multitude of apps can be used to track various metrics, and excel is usually pretty good at crunching them together.

You first need to work out What metrics you need to track? Why? and how? SEO in a loose sense is just a form of marketing, you need to track the success of this single marketing avenue, the success of other marketing avenues, and the combined success.

Does that make sense?

[Enthused]

Yes, thanks it does make sense. Well it would be all types of websites mainly e-commerce, i understand its vital to have software which allows you to record these statistics.

Though in order to be able to record them you need visitors.

I don't know if you know what im on about, though ive been to a couple of seo companies and every one runs the site through some sort of software which produces a report on a specific search term (keyword)?

I was just wondering if anyone in these forums uses any software like this? And is it worth investing in any software like this?

I totally understand you cant get a piece of software to do the work for you though im sure it can point you in the right way?

Thanks

[BlueDreamer]

Enthused, on 02 September 2010 - 08:49 AM, said:

I don't know if you know what im on about, though ive been to a couple of seo companies and every one runs the site through some sort of software which produces a report on a specific search term (keyword)?

That's because many so called "SEO companies" rarely do any real SEO, they do marketing...

Getting decent search results is one thing, but turning visitors into paying customers is quite another. You can be no.1 for all your chosen search terms but if your site doesn't entice people to get their credit cards out then all those top positions are rather pointless!

Btw - Google Analytics allows you to track visitors through to sales and gives you a lot of valuable data.

[Enthused]

Yes im aware that the site has to have the right content to convert the sale and thsi is where copywritting plays a major part.

I think it works both ways though you need the visitors in order to see the content and you need the content to be correct to convert the sale.

Im sure its a balance of both.

What do you class as real SEO?

Yes i use google analytics and open cart allows you to record sales and which products are being visited most etc.

[awebuser]

Google analytics should be good enough for what you need especially if you have enabled ecommerce stats to track which traffic sources are actually creating sales. Analytics has a lot of very useful data. I agree many SEO companies are just concerned with rankings you need to think about CRO (conversion rate optimisation) not just SEO.

[BlueDreamer]

Enthused, on 02 September 2010 - 12:40 PM, said:

What do you class as real SEO?

Good question! When you "optimise" a site for search engines it's all about catering for the needs of your visitors.

In the case of an online shop that means having a few key things in place:

1. An easy to understand method of navigation product categories/sections with short/relevent easy to read category/section names
2. Well written and useful product information
3. Relevent and useful support infomation

Of course the key is in what/how you write, the words you use and whether it's relevent to the needs of your customers. The idea is when the search bots come to crawl your site you'll have already included all the care words that your customers might look for. Once your pages start appearing on search listings you should (hopefully) see them including all your care words that your customers are looking for.

That is, in a nutshell, "SEO". Everything else is marketing and promotion.

[Enthused]

Thanks bluedreamer i think i get the picture now! +1

[BlueDreamer]

No problem, but get some other opinions as well

[Christy]

If you want to measure your SEO efforts, you may use Google analytics and can prepare as many reports as you want.

[Enthused]

BlueDreamer, on 02 September 2010 - 11:20 PM, said:

No problem, but get some other opinions as well

Thats what im doing picking everyone's brains, the thing is that no one really knows how google works they just have a rough idea.