SEO & Analytics from Andy McIlwain

http://www.andymci.com/webmasters-toolkit-seo-analytics/

This was probably my favorite presentation from WordCamp 2012!

It’s not because Andy obviously informed us of great tools, but because he pointed out the importance of having a clear goal for SEO and web traffic. It sounds like such a common sense, but it’s not.

I’m just going to refer his words since I will need to ruminate:

“Metrics are useless if you don’t know what you’re measuring. You need to determine your business objectives first – what are you trying to achieve with your web presence? Once you’ve figured that out, you must define the goals, and the KPIs that indicate progress towards goals.

Excellent Example: an amazing blog post diving into goals and KPIs. Here, we see a business objective of lead generation; the website goal is to capture leads, and the KPI is subscriptions to an e-newsletter. Avinash has a few pre-made custom reports available for Google Analytics to help you jump start your work in building plans like the one in this example.”

Other great tools:

• Created by developer Joost de Valk, the WordPress SEO plugin*
• UserTesting.com – A relatively inexpensive way to get usability feedback from users. If you want to see how a real person goes about completing a task on your website, UserTesting is a good start.
• Chart Beat – Real-time analytics for your site. Google is starting to do more with real-time data reporting, but it’s still in beta and not entirely reliable.
• Optimizely – Simplified A/B testing with an extensive list of satisfied customers. Some names you may have heard of: Starbucks, Lending Tree, TechCrunch, Shopify, CBS, and Disney.
• Crazy Egg – Intuitive, visual overlays that show how your site is actually being used by visitors.