3 replies to this topic

[mbrighton]

We embarked on a very successful site optimization effort back in July 2009. According to Google Analytics, in the last 8 months we have seen our organic traffic, orders and revenue increase about 150% compared to last year.

Here’s the issue…our company is old school direct mail where EVERYTHING is tightly tracked. We all know that it’s not quite that black and white with organic. Another item to note is that we cookie visitors for 90 days. When we move these orders to our legacy system…if the customer had been previously cookied, was ever a customer in the past (we’ve been in business since 1974), they are reassigned to a retention program and the SEO campaign gets no credit. Many of these come in on long tailed keywords that rank in the top 5. My argument is that you probably wouldn’t have gotten that “retention” order if you didn’t rank for those keywords. Also, any search on our company name is assumed to be from retention as we are not a major brand.

Now I know an order’s an order, right? And that’s how I feel. But some around here, based on the legacy data, would rather put less effort into SEO because according to the legacy numbers, we have not realized the benefit. I, on the other hand, feel like we have only scratched the surface of the true potential on the organic arena.

Does anyone out there have a similar situation, where you re-categorize the organic traffic into other buckets. If so, how do you promote the true potential of SEO? Are there better ways of tracking?

[Jill]

Are you getting traffic for keyword phrases beyond long tail?

[mbrighton]

Yes, we are getting a lot of traffic on both long and short keywords. I forgot to mention, we did a site review with you and implemented some of your ideas. So thank you!

I guess my point was that some of these long tailed keywords are very specific. But some of these had been previously cookied or a previous customer (remember, we've been in business 35 years!). We live and die by our legacy data, so when some of these orders get moved and recategorized, we don't report them to be part of our SEO efforts. I'm just trying to figure out a better way to show the benefit of our efforts.

[Jill]

I think, in your case, showing all the traffic that comes in for the keyword phrases you optimized should make things pretty clear. I'm not really sure what more you can do. The data should pretty much speak for itself.