I’ve seen an interesting trend lately with our customer SEO results. Those customers who have an onsite blog are getting traffic AND conversions from their blogging efforts. In some cases up to 25% of their non-paid traffic is coming from this blog content. This is nothing unusual. Google loves content and the more you post solid content, the better off you’ll be. It’s just nice to see the “proof”.
The first step in tracking this behaivior is to track which keywords are driving traffic to your site. This can be done using Google Analytics and setting up goals. You can get information on how to do this by going here http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55515
The “goal” should be a page that a website visitor can only get to, AFTER filling out a contact form on your website. Once your goals are set up, wait several days for Google Analytics to collect enough data.
To access which keywords are driving traffic, login into your analytics account and navigate to “traffic sources”, then click on “keywords”. Analytics will display all the keywords which have driven traffic to your site over the given date range. If you then click on “non-paid” and “goal set”, analytics will filter the display to only include the “non-paid” keywords or keywords other than paid search traffic. If you’re not running a paid search campaign, you don’t need to worry about this.
You can also adjust the display to include the “landing page” or the page that the website visitor “landed on” after typing the keyword into a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc) and clicking on your website link listed in the SERP. If you look at the landing page, you’ll notice how many keywords are converting from your on-site blog.
I like to export this information from Google Analytics to see exactly which terms are driving traffic and more importantly which ones are converting. If you begin to see patterns regarding which blog posts are converting more than others, you can adjust your posts to focus in on that traffic.
Happy blogging!