SEO and Reporting: After The Work Is Done Or Is It? - General Server and Site Statistics Reporting
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There are hundreds of Web site statistics and analytics software available to choose from. They all provide the basic functions of tracking visitors or traffic, pages visited, referrer sites, keyword phrases and browser/computer types. Many programs offer more options and features that can cost more, so we will just review the basic features available.
The first statistic one can monitor is daily traffic and visitor patters. Normally a search engine optimization consultant will ask to view any available Web statistics before and after beginning the job of optimizing ones site. What one would like to see is an increase of traffic to the site over time. Monitoring traffic and visitors will allow you to easily see if your search engine optimization techniques applied to your client's site has had an impact on traffic. It is also important to watch and track if your traffic has spiked but sales have remained constant. If this is the case, you can be certain that you have optimized for the wrong keywords!
Monitoring pages visited helps determine which pages are most popular and which just stand in the shadows. Many search engine optimizers try to drive traffic to specific internal pages and not just the homepage. The purpose of driving traffic to a specific page is two fold. The first reason is that it is best to optimize pages for unique keywords by spreading out the targeted keywords over several pages. The second reason is to send the searcher to the page of his or her interest and not require a user to navigate through your site to find the information he or she is looking for. If you notice that some pages are doing well and have a high amount of traffic versus other pages that are doing poorly, then you will need to make some changes. Most search engine optimization consultants leave the pages that have high traffic alone and work on the pages that need help. Readjust the keywords on the slow pages, build more back links to them and revise the copy. There is a lot one can do to improve each and every page of ones site.
Referrers or referring sites statistics is an excellent way to find out which sites your traffic is coming from. Normally the top referrer is "no referrer", which means that the traffic is coming from people who enter in your URL into the browser's address bar. Directly under that you will find sites where your referring traffic is coming from. For many sites the second referrer will be from Google. You can track and see which search engines and sites are bringing in the most traffic. So if you have a link from a popular organizational site, you can drive a lot of traffic from that site. This statistic gives you the ability to determine your strong areas and weak areas as well as the sites you should focus on the most. By knowing that 10 visitors came from site A and 1 visitor came from site B, you are able to pull your listing (if it costs you money) from site B and focus on more sites like site A. In search engine optimization terms, if you know most of your traffic is coming from Google as compared to other search engines you can focus on optimizing the site for Google as opposed to other engines (keep in mind that Yahoo!, AOL and other popular search engines use Google's index).
Most Web site statistics software comes with a way to monitor search engine driven traffic and the keywords or keyword phrases used to find your Web pages. By monitoring the amount of traffic delivered by specific keywords one can adjust his or her strategy to include more relevant keywords. For example, if you see that a service or product is popular to your customers but not popular in the keyword list then you should spend more time optimizing for a similar keyword that might drive traffic to those pages. In addition, if you have keywords that are not related to your site's copy then why waste your bandwidth, use this report to re-structure your keyword selection campaign.
The last report, which really does not have much to do with SEO, is the browser and computer type report. This is generally important to keep track of when testing your site. Now that Netscape announced that it would no longer be releasing newer versions of its browser and Microsoft announced that is will not longer release Apple Internet Explorer browsers, the number of browser types have declined. It is however important to see what your current users are viewing your site in. If 80% of your Web users are using Windows computers with Internet Explorer 5, then you want to make sure that your site works with that configuration. And if 15% of your users are using Macintosh Safari browsers, you better make sure it works on that platform. It's the 1% or smaller that you might consider cutting corners on.
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