• E-Marketing Performance, Tuesday, March 4, 2008 12:45 PM

Ever been faced with an unhappy client who is sure that your efforts to remove duplicate content, and improve things like site functionality and visibility, had actually led to decreased traffic and sales? When Stoney deGeyter was faced with a similar situation, he turned to Web analytics to validate the SEO efforts.

In terms of the declining traffic claims, deGeyter aimed to see whether there was a difference in traffic to optimized pages vs. pages that hadn't yet been optimized. "If we found that while other pages show a decrease in traffic by X amount but the pages we have optimized for specific keywords are showing less of a decrease, or even an increase, then this can show that the optimization is effective in bringing in traffic," deGeyter says.

Applying the same logic to conversions and search traffic can also produce data that refutes claims that the SEO efforts were ineffective or even bad for business. According to deGeyter, data is the only way to measure the efficacy of your search efforts. Without analytics, "you won't know if you are successful and you won't be able to determine what's causing the perceived failure," deGeyter says.

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