Many people tend to view Internet marketing as a project. We talk about marketing campaigns, which by definition, have a start, and, at some point, an end. In fact, Internet marketing is an ongoing cycle. The parts of the Internet marketing process that people tend to leave out are “analysis” and “refinement“.
It is absolutely critical that you closely measure the results of any marketing efforts you undertake, and see exactly how your blog or site performed. You might, for example, be successful in driving lots of traffic, but unsuccessful at converting or monetizing it. This is a good indication that your site is not optimized to convert.
By understanding where visitors come from and what they did on your site, you can refine your marketing efforts before repeating the whole process. Each time you refine and repeat you should be able to squeeze a bit more traffic from your content, and up your conversion rate slightly. The cumulative effect of these marketing iterations will eventually bring you revenue and profit.
By way of example I thought I would give one sneaky example of how analysis and refinement can be used to help drive additional traffic to your blog or site. I call it keyword consolidation.
Keyword consolidation
In order to be able to consolidate important keywords and key-phrases, you will need access to Google webmaster tools, or something similar. Webmaster tools helps track which keywords on your site are the most common and which search terms return pages from your site.
Keyword analysis
Google webmaster tools will give you a good idea of how much search traffic comes through to your website and the search terms for which Google returned a page impression. Now, the important thing here is that while a visitor may not have seen your page returned on the first page, Google still lets you know that one of your pages ranked say, 110 in its results.
This information is extremely useful because Google is telling you that it knows you have important content relating to that search term, but you aren’t important enough to outrank almost everyone else and appear on the first page.
Armed with this information, you can now undertake some targeted and responsive refinement to help lift your site and individual pages up the rankings for that term.
SEO refinement
With the analytical part of our keyword consolidation technique out of the way you can now put together a strategy to enhance your site’s authority and visibility for that particular keyword or phrase – in other words, we are going to use SEO techniques to lift the page that is currently floundering at 10 or 11 in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
To do this you need to create more high quality, relevant and focused content that can reference the page in question. It doesn’t matter if you only add the content to your own site – it will still help. If Google sees that you have, say, 20 internal links (an internal link is one from one page on your own site to another page on your own site) from different pages to one page in particular, it will automatically assume that the target page is more important than other pages with less internal links.
Don’t go overboard! Google will smell a rat if you add internal links from every page to that single page. It needs to be done only where it is appropriate and meaningful to do so.
In addition, you want to ensure that the actual links that point to the target page contain the keywords and phrases for which you want that page to move up the rankings. This is to help Google understand the content of that page.
Finally, it is first prize to get external links back to that page, containing the keywords and phrases for which you want the page to rank highly. To do this, write expert articles, guest blog posts, forum posts, social media posts and anything else you can think of that will encourage people to post your content and thereby link back to the target page.
Repeat
Give Google some time to index all the new content and make its mind up about what goes where (i.e. update its index), and then go back and see how much improvement there has been on Google webmaster tools.
By constantly monitoring your analytical data you are able to use any number of powerful techniques (not only the one highlighted in this post) to make your Internet marketing more intelligent and responsive.
Analysis is easy to skip over because unless you’re that way inclined, it can seem pretty boring! But without it you’re basically wasting your time.