In about a week and a half I’ll be attending the DC-version of half day seminar put on by WebTrends entitled “Moving from Metrics to Results: Mastering the 7 Key Areas of Your Web Initiatives”. I expect it to be about half sales pitch and half actual, useful info. I’ll be sure to follow up on this afterwards.
In the evolution of a search marketer a strong focus on web analytics is certainly not step one. I’d argue that the general stages are:
1) Discovery of Search Engine Optimization as a desireable and potentially highly-effective means of website promotion.
2) Basic research into how search engines rank pages, and how to improve one’s rankings.
3) Strong focus on optimizing on-page content such as title tags, improving keyword density, etc.
4) Obsession with monitoring rankings in the major search engines, typically following some moderate success based on the work done in step 3.
5) Frustration and anti-search engine attitude when discovering that although the SEO has optimized for many terms, they are only ranked well for some of them, and only in some engines.
6) More research, discovery that inbound links are important.
7) Fierce manual link building campaigns.
8) More success.
9) Feeling of being overwhelmed, search for automated tools for link building, optimization, rankings.
10) Realization that automated tools are no good.
11) Realization that rankings, while useful, are meaningless without traffic.
12) Focus on traffic.
13) Search for accurate, reliable, useful web analytics / web metrics tools.
14) Realization that the top rankings aren’t necessarily bringing all the traffic.
15) Focus on KW research.
16) Realization that traffic is great, but traffic that converts is better.
17) Obsession with attracting targeted traffic that is more likely to convert.
That’s about where I’m at right now anyways 🙂