You've performed keyword research. You optimized your website for the search engines. You have even started a link building campaign to gain untold numbers of relevant, inbound links. So, you're done right? Wrong. It's time to see the effects of all this work, re-evaluate the optimization, and plan your next move.



Take a look

Tracking and reporting are as natural to search engine optimization as weighing yourself when you're on a diet. Yet, many people don't track the results of their SEO work. Some people track the results of the optimization and link building simply by noticing whether their site seems to be busier. Others go as far as running a search ranking report a few weeks after the initial SEO is completed, but don't continue running reports assuming their rankings will not change. Meanwhile, they may be targeting the wrong keywords, their rankings are probably dropping, and they may be missing great opportunities.

The SEO Diet:

Let's run with the diet analogy for a minute. Optimization and link building are like diet and exercise. When you are trying to loose weight, you do the work of dieting and exercising, but you also get on the scale every day. You track how far you can run, how much weight you can lift, or how many inches your waste has shrunk. These are all important things to do because it tells you if what you are doing is working and it encourages you to continue. As you see the pounds coming off, it motivates you to continue. Similarly, you can see if the SEO is working or if the search engine optimization for some keywords needs to be re-evaluated do to poor performance. You can determine what keywords need more than just on-page optimization and thus need to be targeted when link building. Also, as you see your rankings improving and your website traffic increasing, it can encourage you and motivate you to push on with your online church marketing.

Search Ranking Reports:

The primary way most people track the results of search engine optimization is by running search ranking reports. These reports tell you where your website is currently ranking in the major search engines for your targeted keywords. The reports themselves don't affect your rankings, but they do give you insight into the effect of the work you have done and what areas you may need to improve on.

Let's say when you first started the optimization process, you decided to target some less competitive keywords because your website was new and you wanted to start getting more website traffic as soon as possible. As part of your plan, you targeted those keywords with both the on-page optimization as well as the link building. As you were doing this, you ran search ranking reports regularly and tracked the results of the work. After a month or two, the reports indicate that your website is now in the top results for all those keywords. This tells you not only that what you're doing is working, but also that you can now start targeting new keywords with the link building. You may want to continue to target the old keywords with a small percentage of your link building to maintain the high ranking for those keywords, but you know that you can now start targeting more competitive keywords.

Conversely, as you run reports to track your results, you may find that your website is slipping in the rankings for some keywords. This information will let you know that you either lost some of the optimization of the pages targeting these keywords when editing your website or you need to do some additional link building targeting the keywords. Without running the reports, you wouldn't know this and would be working blindly.

Details…Details….Details:

When trying to loose weight, most people have several aspects to their strategy. They do cardio workouts, aerobics, and weight lifting as well as eating certain foods at certain times. Now imagine you are dieting and exercising and someone tells you they can tell you exactly which foods are helping you loose weight and which are hurting your weight loss efforts. They can also tell you which exercises are most effective and which you are wasting effort on, not just because they know what tends to work, but because they can monitor exactly how your individual body is being affected by each food choice or exercise. Similarly, when trying to get more traffic and more conversions through your website, you target a variety of different keywords and use various optimization methods. Now imagine someone can tell you exactly which keywords are actually bringing people to your site, and which keywords are producing the most conversions and bringing the most new people in contact with your ministry. Welcome to the world of analytics. Analytics is software that can track traffic to and from your website as well as on your website. With analytics software you can see how many people are coming to your site from inbound links you've gotten or from the search engines. The software can tell you which keywords people searched for when they found and visited your website. It can even tell you how long they stayed on your site, what pages they visited, and whether or not they completed certain tasks like completing an information request form. In addition to giving you insights into your website design, this is invaluable information that can serve as the other side of the keyword research coin.

Analytics:

Keyword research tells you the popularity and competitiveness of keywords. Analytics can tell you the effectiveness of those keywords.

• You may find that even when you rank well for certain keywords, people don't click through to your site for those keywords. The keyword popularity predicts 500 searches a day and, even though you rank number 1, you are only getting 5-10 clicks a day. This may indicate that the people searching for that keyword aren't actually looking for what you are offering. So, it may be a good idea change the SEO / link building from targeting that keyword to target another keyword.

• You may also find that a large percentage of visitors searching for a lower popularity keyword not only click through to your site, but end up contacting the church. This could lead you to focus more attention on that keyword to make sure you rank number 1.

• Analytics reports may indicate that links on certain types of sites (maybe other church sites or local city listing sites) produce more traffic than other links. This would indicate that it would be more valuable to focus your link building efforts on getting links on those kinds of sites.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of the information you can get from analytics. There are several analytics options to choose from include software you can purchase, professional analytics management services, and free analytics options. One of the more popular (and free) analytics options is Google Analytics.

An Ever Changing Landscape:

The search engines are constantly changing. New sites area being created and shut down every day. More sites are realizing the value of search engine optimization. New strategies for SEO and link building are developed. Even the search engines themselves change as they try to refine their algorithms to produce the most relevant search results. All this means that your search engine rankings are going to change, keyword popularity will change, and links will come and go. Thus for a website you want to become and stay successful, the SEO work is never really done. Running reports, tracking keywords, and watching how visitors interact with your website is essential for devising an effective strategy for search engine marketing.