Let’s imagine that your site has 20,000 visitors a month, and you’re generating $50k per month using SEO and PPC (the latter of which is costing you $10k per month). How could lowering your traffic lead to an improvement in the ROI for your site?

Simply put, you need to look at the targeting for your site. This is where your analytics skills come in to play. Take a look at the organic and paid keywords that drive traffic to your site, then drill down and see which of them actually convert. You may find that a keyword that drives a lot of traffic is completely unrelated to the core functions of your site, and it has a 99% bounce rate, indicating that people get to your site, and run away very quickly.

So what should you do? Well, on the paid side, you should stop throwing money at those bad keywords as soon as you can, instead plough that money into new keywords, longer tail variants of the keywords that are working, or well converting terms from the organic side that you’re not yet bidding on. You should very quickly start to see improvements in your ROI. On the organic side, if you have a page that’s ranking well for a non-related term, see what you can do to re-optimize that page for related terms.

When you next look at your figures and see that you now have 10,000 visitors per month, generating 75k of revenue with a PPC spend of 8k, you need to walk those figures to your boss, and tell them that you’d like their job once they get promoted based on these figures.

Filed under: Analytics, PPC, SEO on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine | No Comments
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.