Everything’s done: you’ve worked hard to overhaul your content, clean up your code, solidify your architecture and insert search engine optimisation techniques neatly throughout your site. Your pages have gone live, and the first few tense weeks have passed. Results will soon be coming in, but will you be able to understand them?

This sounds like a facile question, but it most certainly is not. The results of your site’s SEO have to be interpreted in a way that’s just as unique to your business as the original optimisation was. What’s appropriate for one site will not be so for another as ‘one size does not fit all’. Your business goals and workings are unique to your business. A basic analysis of your SEO results will not provide you with the answers that determine whether your plan was the right fit.

Approaching analysis of your site’s data on your own can be a very daunting exercise, and it’s important to seek professional advice. Your SEO firm should help you through the initial analysis of your search engine optimisation results. Many packages will provide similar information. You can discuss with your SEO consultant about the tools that will be used to monitor your site’s data in the weeks after optimisation. A good SEO firm will do some of the analysis for you, but it is quite important to know how to approach your own site’s data.

The first step is to separate the different types of data on your site. Organic results are understandably different from pay per click traffic, but these will not necessarily be automatically sectioned off by packages. Next, you need to sort the traffic on your site into categories of behaviour. Most businesses want to see what their SEO has done for their conversion rates. It’s important to compare this data to the volume of traffic in total. Other things to look at will include bounce rate and volumes of traffic for the home page, landing pages and exit pages. It’s a good idea to look out for unexpected entry and exit pages being used on your site, as this will provide some warning signs that your site’s navigation isn’t working as you planned. Examining the basic levels of traffic each keyword has driven is also useful.

The time periods you study will have relevance. If a new keyword was added to your plan after your site went live, you need to allow for a different time lapse for that page. In some industries, for example retail, time is extremely relevant to results, and seasonal searches will play a part.

It can be helpful to examine the page ranking information within your data after you’ve analysed these other results. Of course, your ranking is important, and needs to be looked at separately. If a keyword has driven high volumes of traffic to your site but has a low ranking, you need to decide on whether to change your SEO strategy. SEO Consult can assist you to assess the situation.

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