SEO AnalyticsLeaving the cost of an analytics program aside, below are some of the things a Search Strategist should look for in order to become adept in SEO Analytics:

  • Data separation by organic search: To be able to truly understand how well your SEO campaign is doing, the basics have to be there in order to properly separate out PPC data. This should be on a very detailed level so you can drilldown by keyword or page or any other major variable in order to know whether the whole campaign did well or just certain parts.
  • Vertical abilities: As a Search Strategist who works on a multitude of clients, the program has to be able to provide data that is beneificial to those vast differences from an ecommerce client to a content provider. The reason is simply that the goals for each client will vary and thus the key indicators should vary as well.
  • Usability: My time is valuable (or so I believe) and therefore I do not want to be sitting for five minutes waiting for the analytics program to pull one set of data; if the program is slow, I do not care how advanced the program is I can do more for my clients on my own. In this way I should not be digging around and clicking 30+ times just to get to what I need to look at.
  • Export function: You cannot please everyone with whatever charts the analytics program displays and often times I find them rather ugly myself. Thus, I need to be able to pull some data and recreate the data in a nicer graph or take that data and merge it with external non-analytics data.
  • Customization: The more customizable the program is, the more I will keep my attention to that analytics program. As I am interested from an Analytical SEO perspective, I will be coming up with new formulas and metrics that the creators of the analytics program will never think of. Restricting what I can do to a large degree means I will be looking else where to integrate all the data together in the long-term.
  • Integrated Campaigns: SEO may be my main focus, yet more and more I need to know just how my work complements someone in PPC and other campaigns.
  • Truly Integrated Campaigns: I want to move beyond correlations; that means I do not want to sit down and show the client that his revenue increased because of SEO + PPC, I want to show that it was due to having SEO, PPC, and a factor of SEO * PPC (yeah, econometrics!). Unfortunately, that means I the conversion event tracking through the whole person’s event, not just their last session-based event. Therefore analytics programs that focus solely on click-based sessions are going to be at a stong disadvantage in the long-run.
  • Funnel Analysis: SEO has been very focused in the past on purely higher positions and lately more on driving traffic. I forsee conversion events and becoming a factor, but in order for that to matter heavily on my SEO campaigns, I need control over the layout of the pages organic searchers are coming through. Without a funnel analysis, there is no way for me to determine if I have relevant traffic but poor usability or vice versa beyond the bounce/exit rates.

When it comes down to it, I have only heard of Coremetrics having the ability to do all of the above functions quite well; that said until I get to try it out Google Analytics is probably the closest analytics program available to fitting within the above SEO Analytics requirements.

Now, what would be in a dream-world analytics program:

  • Backlink analysis by page
  • KW position trackings
  • ROI analysis by keyword (this is here since paid links are violations of Google’s Guidelines and thus Search Strategists are not supposed to be able to do this then to any accurate degree)