For website owners and beginners
In this article, we will tell you how website optimization affects sales and revenue, and how to evaluate business performance for SEO.
Why is an SEO channel better than contextual advertising?
To get leads and convert them into sales, you need to improve the efficiency of both SEO and PPC advertising. But in combination, they only work well when you have a large advertising budget. If you don t have much money, invest it in an SEO channel. Its main advantages:
- Works in the long term… You fix technical errors, fill the site with content, create a link mass, improve the interface – you do everything so that search engines see the absence of problems on your site and bring its pages to organic search results. The better the resource is optimized, the higher positions can be expected. Search engines look at the age of the resource and will not rate newly emerging sites highly. Therefore, working with SEO always takes a long time – the first results come in a few months.
- Leads shareware leads… You only spend your budget on the SEO specialist and the tools they need to optimize. Spend a little, but leads come in gradually. Their cost can be very low compared to the cost of leads from contextual advertising.
- Gains more trust from the audience… SEO leads buyers from organic search results. You expect high quality and reliability from sites with high positions, because they got into the TOP-10 in organic terms not because they paid for contextual advertising.
In order for the SEO channel to lead to leads, the site must be optimized.
You should not expect an increase in applications if the work on resource optimization has not been carried out. Search engines will see that your site has errors with tags, a 404 page is displayed incorrectly and a lot of broken links. The path to the top of organic search results will be closed.
To find and fix errors on the site, you need to regularly conduct an SEO audit. With its help, you can solve 4 tasks for website promotion:
- Find technical errors… Check the basic data of the site – age, ICS (site quality index), the number of pages indexed in search engines, their loading speed, tags. Don t forget the 404 page and mobile responsiveness. This data can be checked in Yandex.Webmaster and PageSpeed ??Insights services. If the indicators deviate from the optimal, adjust them and correct the errors.
- Increase your position in organic search results… Evaluate the link profile of the resource – which links lead to your site, which pages the resource links to. Look at the competitors – how sites from the TOP-10 are optimized, for which queries they are promoted. This information will help you better optimize the resource.
- Improve commercial factors… How convenient is your site? Evaluate its usability to increase conversions. Add an online chat, create a “Contacts” section, highlight data on prices, delivery, payment methods, and create a section with reviews. The fewer questions about the interface and navigation, the better search engines rank the site.
- Improve content… Correct spelling mistakes, write headings and subheadings for articles, study analytics for the queries for which you are moving. Evaluate your competitors and choose the keys clearly. This will help search engines show your site in relevant organic SERPs.
SEO audit can be done manually or automatically using a dozen different tools, for example, Serpstat, PR-CY, Ahrefs and others. Roistat also has an SEO audit service. He can check the site for basic errors in a couple of minutes and offer a detailed report with recommendations on how to fix them.
How to understand if an SEO channel is actually driving audiences, leads, and sales
Errors were corrected, optimization was carried out. After a few months, leads started coming in. How do you measure the return on SEO now?
Level 1: connecting web analytics… It will show the sources of traffic to the site: who came from contextual advertising, and who from organic search results. You will receive more information about visits and will be able to clarify the data about the audience: which groups of users visit you more often, from which cities they are, at what time they use the Internet. And you will also find out what requests were sent to your site.
Level 2: connecting end-to-end analytics… End-to-end analytics will combine data from web analytics with data from CRM. With its help, you can find out how many visits, requests and sales were from each channel, how much revenue was brought by all traffic sources, including SEO.
The end-to-end analytics service collects data from various sources: website, social networks, advertising accounts, CRM, and collects information into summary reports in a couple of minutes. In them, you can estimate not only the number of leads and requests from the SEO channel, but also find out which search engine brings more requests, what is the average check for buyers who came from organic, how much it costs to attract one lead or order.
End-to-end analytics shows the entire user journey – where he came from, what he did on the site, which pages he viewed, where he left a request, what purchase he made. So you will understand what actions to take to get not only traffic, but also buyers from organic search results.
Example: we have a notary office, for promotion we ordered 10 articles about what a notary does – advice, personal experience, useful knowledge. We optimized them for search results. It cost us 40,000 rubles. How do you measure the return on investment? After a while, we will check the business indicators.
During this time, we received 2,000 visits from the SEO channel to our blog articles, 50 leads, which were converted into 20 sales worth 300,000 rubles. As a result, the SEO channel brought in 240,000 rubles. You can also compare the indicators of different periods – 3 months before the publication of articles and 3 months after.
Explore how traffic has changed from SEO and how your costs affected traffic and website revenue.
What indicators should be considered when assessing the effectiveness of an SEO channel
An effective organic traffic channel should lead, at a minimum, site visits and participate in multichannel customer acquisition. What indicators should we focus on?
Readability indicator – an indirect sign of the success of the SEO channel. The article is read, it is interesting to the target audience, which means that the page is well optimized and traffic relevant to the request comes to it. Scrolls can be tracked in web analytics.
Non-branded traffic volume… For example, you have prepared and added several SEO-friendly articles to your website. The volume of traffic to the site has grown. Is the SEO channel working? The growth in traffic may be due not only to page optimization or the addition of new content. The reason may also be a seasonal surge in demand, the start of an advertising campaign, or a CEO s speech at a conference. To make sure that article publishing actually contributed to traffic growth, analyze non-branded traffic separately from branded traffic.
Targeted leads from product articles – such articles are needed to acquaint users with the company s product, which means that they can be considered effective when they participate in attracting potential customers. To track the source of leads, you can set goals in web analytics or analyze data from the SEO channel in end-to-end analytics – in the second case, the company will be able to calculate the profit as well.
SEO channel sales Is an important indicator. In the end, the company spent the money on website optimization, not only to get more traffic to the site, but also to generate more revenue.
Additionally, you can track changes in the average conversion rate to an application and to a sale, decrease in CPL and CPO, and also analyze how often an SEO channel participates in a multichannel customer acquisition chain.
Factors to keep in mind when evaluating SEO performance
SEO channel won t start bringing visitors, leads and customers instantly… Don t expect a sharp influx of organic traffic in just a week. On average, it makes sense to evaluate changes 3-4 months after the end of the optimization work.
SEO channel may not drive sales directly… Users can go to the pages of the site, get acquainted with the assortment of the store or read articles, and leave a request after you show them an advertisement, for example, in a search engine.
SEO optimization does not provide a 100% guarantee of performance growth… The principles of getting into the TOP queries are constantly changing, search engines are working on their algorithms. And your competitors can also be engaged in SEO-optimization, their pages for some reason may be liked by the robot more.
SEO channel performance may be seasonally dependent… For example, as the Yandex Word Search service shows, the frequency of the query “how to choose a bouquet†grows in February, before Valentine s Day, and in September, by the beginning of the school year. Therefore, flower delivery services may receive more traffic during these periods, but these spikes are not related to SEO optimization.
the main thing
- Invest in SEO if you have a small budget and are not expecting instant results, but are willing to wait.
- A site optimized for search engines is an opportunity to receive a regular stream of visits and requests from search in the future.
- To solve 4 important optimization tasks – eliminating technical errors, increasing positions in organic SERPs, improving content and commercial ranking factors – regularly conduct an SEO audit of your site.
- Web and end-to-end analytics systems will help you determine how effectively you have optimized your site for search results, whether you are getting a return on investments in optimization.
- When analyzing the effectiveness of your SEO optimization measures, pay attention to landing page scrolls and readability of materials. Track brand inquiries separately.
- Remember that the SEO effect is noticeable in 3-4 months, and do not forget about the seasonality of requests.
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