This month’s video and workbook for our self-service SEO package is about Troubleshooting.

If you’re not a subscriber, here’s a brief overview:

Here are some questions you should ask, whether you’ve done search engine optimization yourself or had a consultant do the work for you:

  • Is traffic to the site improving?
  • Is the traffic meeting your business objectives?
  • Are sales improving by some predictable percentage of the new traffic?

To answer these questions, you need to keep good metrics.  We keep these for our full-service clients and teach our self-service clients how to obtain and keep these numbers with videos and workbooks:

This is a sample set of data:

Keeping good data is key to determining which Search Engine Optimization efforts are having an impact

From this data, you can create some graphs from Excel that might suggest a cause-effect relationship between your efforts and the results. If you notice that an upward spike on the green line (blog posts) often precedes a spike in the blue month (sales) the following month.

This graph may suggest a cause-effect relationship between the number of blog articles published one month and an improvement in sales the following month

This graph may suggest a cause-effect relationship between the number of blog articles published one month and an improvement in sales the following month

From this, you might conclude that writing more blog articles results in more sales the next months. To test this theory, try writing a few more blog posts this month and see if the effect continues for a rise in sales next month.

Keeping good data and seeing these relationships is key to ensuring that your sales continue to improve over time.

In the Troubleshooting video and workbooks, we go into detail about what to do in these cases:

No Improvement in traffic?

  • Check keyword popularity
  • Check to see if the site has been indexed by the search engines  (and fix it if it hasn’t!)
  • Check competition to see what they’re doing with Search Engine Optimization that you’re not.

Improvement in traffic but not sales?

  • Check the relevance of keywords
  • Check with a neutral third party about the clarity and persuasiveness of your copy
  • Check the shopping cart or transaction mechanism (make sure it’s still working – strange how often this is a problem!)

It’s important to keep good data and ask the right questions to be sure you’re getting good results!

For more information about ABCI’s Search Engine Optimization programs, you can read more about

  • Full Service Search Engine Optimization Consulting
  • Do-It Yourself Search Engine Optimization Kit
  • Which option should I choose?

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