Using web analytics is critical to verifying your online efforts are worth the cost. For many of the clients I have worked with, digging through web logs for visitor trends or biggest referring site is not even on their radar. Yes, not having at least AWStats (sorry Webalizer leaves details to be desired) is really like flying blind with your online marketing budget.

If you are in charge of online marketing for your web site - how are you going to justify a bigger budget if you don’t have the statistics to back it up? You want to prove your online marketing efforts each month are worth the cost - and be able to eliminate the under performers.

At minimum, be tracking:

• Search Terms
• Referral Sites
• Online Sales/Subscriptions/Optins

And if you are doing pay per click - watch the conversion rates like a hawk. PPC can empty your budget in no time if the loser keywords are not eliminated.

A simple look through your web analytics data can prove that buying a banner add or purchasing a link has delivered real traffic - traffic that has converted into sales. And if there is no traffic from a sponsored ad, then you’ve got the information to eliminate the cost.

There’s not a lot of detail in this post - but I’ll be doing a follow up that discusses several key features of Google’s free service, Google Analytics.

Building an online presence is similar to opening a business storefront - people need a way to find your business. Without SEO or SEM, it’s as though your store just opened in the middle of the prairie - with no drive-by traffic on the information super highway. If your business is in Omaha, Nebraska, and you want people in the Omaha/Council Bluffs area to find you - SEO methods targeting local search results can bring the qualified visitors for impacting your business.

What Is Local Search?

Local search places an emphasis on local or regional keyword phrases. The scope of how wide the geographic targeted area will be is determined by your business goals. Visitors may be within 5 miles of a business or over 500 miles - it depends on the service area of your business. Researching and winning search engine rankings for keyword phrases related to communities in the targeted local area is the goal of local search strategies.

To make an SEO play for visitors in the Omaha metro area, keywords that focus on local and regional keyword phrases are the foundation of bringing these visitors to your web site. When going through a web design phase, selecting your primary keywords for optimization will guide your selection for other long tail keywords. But let’s pretend you don’t understand what that last sentence means - So what does targeting SEO local search for Omaha look like?

That will really depend on your business - so let’s consider a business that would want to attract specific clients from the Omaha area - not out lying areasa. For SEO, keywords related to Omaha could begin to target specific communities. Specifically, a hypothetical professional cleaning company might start to look at the following local search terms:

Omaha midtown
west Omaha
downtown omaha
north Omaha
south Omaha
Omaha metro area

Expanding this list to include intra and inter-city communities could increase the keyword net:

Benson, Dundee, Florance, Old Market, Regency, Old Mill, Miracle Hills, Millard, Miller Park, Rockbrook, Bellevue, Papillion-LaVista, Ralston, Gretna, Council Bluffs

Is Local Search for Omaha Worth the Effort?

As was stated above - search engine optimization for local search depends on your business objectives. Only you can ultimately decide if expending the resources for keyword research, content creation, and an SEO implementation. So here are a few items to consider:

1. Are there estimated traffic numbers to warrant the cost?
2. Does your web site allow local keyword placement without looking awkward?
3. Is there a reasonable plan for revenue (conversion) to increase from online traffic?

Because local search traffic estimates from services like Wordtracker can be very low to even non-existent, it comes down to selecting a general keyword phrase that has been localized and analyzing the data from your web traffic. Keeping your web site design friendly toward local search terms can be challenging, but can be very rewarding as well.

IMPORTANT: If anything - be VERY conservative in the potential for estimated local search traffic when Google labels the keyword phrase in the Low Search Volume category.

See this article for additional Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics. As the title states, several of the SEO strategies listed in this article are definitely extreme. Example - getting your street/driveway changed to relate to your business name, now that’s something most competitors are not trying to do!

SEO conjures up ideas of free traffic and a never ending supply of potential web site visitors. The premise of search engines bringing targeted visitors drives businesses to gain an advantage over competitors or just merely survive in the market. This topic has been discussed by many others, so I wanted to present my own perspective.

Is SEO traffic all it’s touted to be?

Unfortunately, it’s often a gray area - if only the traffic is considered.

To automagically receive all the online visitors your business has been dreaming of - you’ll be required to invest resources in search engine optimization. This front end cost to online marketing is often glossed over.

On-page factors such as Titles and keyword placement take resources to create. More challenging are the placement of off-page links that drive Google search engine rankings. If you haven’t tried, this is very labor intensive and tedious work. And certainly all links are not created equal.

So what is the Go Factor for SEO?

If your website is not tracking the right analytic data, it’s going to be very difficult to make the Go decision for SEO. Google Analytics can be configured to track e-commerce conversions - so money keywords can be easily identified. This initial data can at least be utilized to target known converting keywords for search engine optimization.

The challenge is speculating - How much SEO traffic will be needed to justify the cost?

This is truly a challenge for SEO companies and their clients. Wordtracker 24 hour estimates are such a small sampling of the world wide web traffic patterns and Google’s Adwords’ keyword tool only provides a 0 to 1 scale for search traffic volume. How can a sound business decision for SEO be made without knowing what percentage of the traffic your site is going to get?

This is where on-going testing of different Titles for click thur rates along with on-site testing of conversion factors is going to play a part in the risk/reward of SEO.

There are no guarantees that any online marketing will be a success - but risk can be minimized. With known money keywords and on-going gathering of analytic data, the risk will be greatly reduced.

IMPORTANT: The analytic data only helps if someone is actually looking at it and making adjustments to your site!

Don’t just settle for having a web page optimized for a keyword phrase. At least understand how that particular keyword phrase qualifies for the SEO Go Factor. Getting traffic from the search engines may not actually be free - but the visitors SEO can bring should at least be targeted as higher converting traffic.