Great Quote From Awin - And So True For SEO

The following quote can be found on an intriguing page on the Affiliate Window website:



But I think it makes so much better sense as:



But to me SEO is not only a science but an ART!

I'm sure most SEO's recognise the problem when those people you're involved with too easily see a set of circumstances and automatically assign causality to something that best suits their agenda.

I'm anal about getting down to real cause and effect. I obsess over data. I've proven over and over again that each visitor is not created equal.

The issue often arises in communicating cause an effect. This is difficult in traditional industries, but when you mix in the huge number of factors that affect rankings and revenue per visitor it leaves even more room for misunderstandings to arise.

Here's an example. Say you change the focus of your "intent" keyword and achieve a nil-sum improvement in terms of traffic numbers, but you get better converting traffic, what data should you be looking at?

Ok, here's some "intent" keywords from a client and the conversion rates from the keyphrases that include that particular keyword:

(site average) 3.54%
buy - 2.66%
best - 5.56%
cheap - 2.79%
cheapest - 3.70%
deal - 5.26%
price - 2.65%
delivery - 5.88%
" uk" - 6.56%
sale - 11.25%

Now it's just too simplistic to say that you should focus primarily on "sale" as it converts at 11.25% when you need to build in the volume of traffic available into your strategy.

Good SEO, to me, is about weighing up the keywords that drive traffic, those that convert, the product data available, their/your ability to implement SEO improvements and the overall marketing objectives of the organisations you're involved in.

One thing that does annoy me in this industry (Mark - I'm moaning as requested) is that people too easily say "X" is a cause of "Y" when there are several factors that go into event "Y" occurring - some in our control, some not; some are as a result of SEO, some not.

My biggest fear is SEO has turned into an "in box, out box" industry where people only care about visitor numbers and don't look into profitability or completely disregard the impact of SEO.

To me SEO isn't necessarily about increasing total visitor numbers, its about increasing the value gained from each visitor whilst ensuring that SEO contributes positively to the bottom line - just like affiliate marketing should do.

My hope is that affiliates, merchants and website owners become a bit more analytical and use the power that the analytics tools availabe to them. The only issue is that we all need to look at the data that matters and think long and hard, explore all other less convenient answers before assign causality.

Luckily I've been in the game for 12 years and spent the previous 3 years studying statistics and causality via an Economics degree, so I've seen all the "excuses" "reasons" under the sun. The real reason is often something a bit more tangential than you think.

Now go and read Freakonomics for real world examples of why relying on the most obvious conclusions can be the most misleading - and this has never been more true than with today's Search Engines.


N.b. I'm still catching up on emails sent during my jollies. So if I've not got back to yet, hold tight.