Optimising your Website
For Organic Search
The benefits an optimised site can bring to a
business are huge in terms of increasing online visitor traffic to your website. Therefore, it is
usually considered essential for online marketing professionals to optimise their websites for
organic search.
This article outlines search engine optimisation, offering an overview of what is involved when optimising your websites for organic search. It should be used as an information piece, giving an introduction to web analytics for anyone interested in increasing the volume of relevant traffic to their websites.
Business Goal
The goal of analysing organic search is to maximise your outcomes, in this case overall visitors to your site, by selecting a set of keywords to optimise your site content.
When you optimise your website for organic search, a good first step is to first select a target set of keywords for which you will design and optimise your web pages. It will also be necessary to exclude some keywords in this process, accepting that you will not rank high on those. In addition, you will have to decide how much effort to invest into the optimisation of each page in order to increase its organic rank for the selected set of keywords.
Common Terminology
Organic Rank: refers to your website’s first appearance among search results for a specific keyword on a search engine.
Referring URLs: refers to the URLs that drive online traffic to your website. Referrers could include other websites or organic search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
Organic Search: refers to the free search results that internet search engines such as Google return when visitors query them with specific keywords.
Entry Pages: refers to the web pages that visitors arrive on when visiting your website. Entry pages may be linked to from an organic or a paid search listing for example.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimisation refers to a range of optimisation techniques, most importantly the efforts of designing or adjusting content of web pages such that their rank, by a particular search engine, for entered keywords improves.
Search engines employ crawlers (robots/spiders) that periodically visit selected pages of websites in order to capture their content for inclusion in the indexes of the search engine.
Sample Affinium NetInsight Most Popular Robots and Spiders Report
Beware of over optimising your site for one search engine as this may reduce your ranking in another search engine. It is also important to remember that as search engine algorithms change over time, this may further affect your website ranking.
Common Challenges
- A web page may rank high for a specific keyword while ranking lower even for slight variations of the same word.
- The organic rank of a website changes as Internet search engines adjust their algorithms and indexes, and as competitors adjust their websites.
- Visitors from organic search can enter a website on arbitrary web pages
Measuring Success
Lord Kelvin, an eminent physicist, once said: -
“When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it”.
In the context of web analytics, this means in order to optimise your site you will need to measure the effects of the changes you are making.
Although the query strings on search results pages differ between Internet search engines, it is useful to produce a keyword summary which extracts visitors’ keywords from the referring URLs. This will confirm whether or not the keywords expected to generate more visitors are doing so.
To provide more insight you might consider refining the report, so as to restrict the report to visitors who purchased on your site. A keyword summary filtered in this way will then show conversions of visitors from organic search to purchasers and could look similar to the chart displayed on the left-hand page.
In order to measure how well your site is indexed by search engines, you may find it useful to produce a summary that tracks visits by their crawlers, as demonstrated in the screenshot on the right. Filtering this summary to a specific website page, you can see which search engines have indexed that page.
Investigating the Data
There are many ways in which you can investigate visits from organic search. For example:
- By filtering the reports of content viewed with specific organic keywords, you can find out what pages visitors employing these keywords landed on. If these entry pages do not correspond with your intentions, this could indicate a problem and you may therefore need to change your website content or keywords.
- By cross-tabulating a summary of entry pages with a keyword summary, you can see the most frequent entry pages on your website for each keyword. These pages should fulfil the requirements indicated by the keyword. If this is not the case, then you may need to adjust the content.
- By running a summary of path information from the most frequent entry pages for a specific keyword, you can see how visitors navigate your website. This could indicate whether or not any changes need to be made to the website navigation.
- By cross tabulating a summary of referrers with a summary of keywords, you can see the keywords that are most often employed on each search engine. If you want to conduct search engine specific optimisation, this will allow you to develop page content that targets particular search engines.
These types of reports give you valuable business information to effectively optimise your site for organic search, resulting in an increase in the volume of relevant traffic to your websites.
Sample Affinium NetInsight Popular Keywords by Referrer Report
More Information
If you would like some further information on Unica Affinium NetInsight, featured in the screenshots on this page, or would be interested in talking to us about our web analytics and monitoring solutions, then please visit our Evaluate NetInsight page, registering your details, and a member of the SCL team will be in touch. Alternatively, please contact us on +44 (0)1293 403636.
