Valitics. Web Strategies, Net Results

I have been reaclimating myself with our Google Analytics data, and have been surprised at the trends.  You always hope for "up and to the right," but that is somewhat idealistic.  The reality is that no matter what your metric it will likely fluctuate -- trends are long term, which can mean years. 

There are a lot of things that influence trends outside of your own efforts, like the economy, demand for your services, competition, etc.  So, with regard to SEO, why bother with monthly or weekly "health checks?"

Watch for surprises -- we have received a boost of traffic due to two simple blog posts on marketing in a down economy. The keywords center around "marketing in a down economy." Not a shocker, but what do you think is on people's mind? More important, do you think people will be shifting their ad budget from the yellow pages to the web?

Make sure the things you expect are still happening -- most of our organic traffic comes from branded terms, if that weren't the case I would be concerned. If your branded traffic suddenly stopped you might need to check basic things like content or proper site indexing.

Top of mind usually encourages action -- you are far more likely to do something proactive with your website if you are consistently reviewing data about it. When you are consistent you will get a feel for cause and effect (e.g. when we send out our monthly newsletter, organic search volumes increase.

I could probably bore you with 100 reasons, but you get the idea. Reviewing your website data will make you more aware and therefore more able to improve your search engine visibility. Then you can see how the market affects your trend -- ranking high on Internet Marketing Boise was important to us, but it has proven to be more of a branding benefit than a traffic source. In fact, moving from 10 to 2 has not created an "up and to the right" for us, so we are working on other terms now -- lesson learned, for now.