Small Business SEO Series Part 3 – Analyze

Your company’s website could be the most vital portal you have to attract new customers. If you build a site with compelling content and a strong social media presence, then follow up with strong calls to action and sophisticated campaigns to nurture your leads, you will have the tools you need to attract more prospects than ever before. But putting all this in place is only half the job, as you need to make sure these investments are generating the proper return.

As part of an inbound marketing strategy, tools like blogging, social media and SEO for small business can help your site get noticed, while landing pages and lead nurturing can turn your visitors into customers, but there is no guarantee that all your efforts will succeed. Analysis will help you measure the efficiency of your efforts, and what you can do to improve.

Before you begin, it’s important to set clear goals for how many leads you want to produce and what your sales figures ought to be. Once you have the data in hand, a clear target will tell you where you need to focus your efforts in order to meet those goals. Analysis gives you information, but using it is up to you.

Good analysis begins with good data, so you should identify the key metrics that illustrate how effectively your content, marketing and SEO for small business are converting your prospects into leads. Tracking the number of visitors to your website will show whether you’re succeeding at getting found, and the number of people who responded to one of your calls to action will show you how many leads you’ve generated. The most important number tells you how many people have choose to become your customers, because this powers your bottom line.

Each set of metrics will tell you something different. If you want to know whether you’re using proper SEO for small business, for instance, you should check your site traffic and keyword analytics. You want to draw in a lot of visitors, but your profits depend on your conversion rate — how many visitors become leads, and how many leads become customers. At each stage, you’re going to lose some prospects, and the data can tell you how many.

Analyzing the data in a vacuum can only tell you so much, so it pays to be aware of the benchmarks: What the metrics usually look like for your peers at similar companies, and how your own results compare. At the same time, make sure you’re only comparing similar content, as your website will contain multiple types and each one should be analyzed independently.

Using this approach, you can use your analysis to pinpoint exactly where your approach can benefit most from improvement. If your visitor numbers aren’t meeting the proper benchmarks, you should take a new look at your content or your approach to SEO for small business. If your conversion rate of visitors to leads is low, you can focus on your calls to action and your landing pages. If you have a good number of leads but too few customers, then your sales process deserves your attention.

There is no single perfect way to launch a successful website, since the specific needs of your business will depend on your product and your customers.