Recently i’ve been working on a review of an SEO campaign for a major high street retailer, reviewing the keywords and measuring them against conversion data from Google Analytics and the awesome Hitwise data that can not only show you what terms people are using to find your sites, but also what term was used 2,3,4,and 5 times before the tracked first click that Analytics records. The results are startling. Some massive ‘clothing’ terms drive huge traffic to the site but they dont convert. Even tracking these terms as repeat visitors using brand terms down the line yields pretty poor traffic volumes for example the biggest term converting to a brand term is less than 0.2%. What this means for SEO’s is that you shouldnt chase and invest your time and clients cash into these red herring keywords as they do nothing but waste your time. The only problem is that to discover a red herring term you need back-data which is where Hitwize comes in.
So my advice is to either seriously scrutinise and review your campaign keywords at say every 3 months throughout the contract or, for sites that already have achieved some success, speak to the Hitwise team and get the reporting done. It may cost you a couple of grand but it will save you and your client that and more in next to no time.
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