Learning from Reports
... and Adjusting Accordingly

Now that your website has been built and initially optimized, the next stage of SEO can begin; ReOptimization.

This website has explained the importance of reports and that optimization never ends. What does this mean? Depending on what you are optimizing and who you are trying to market to the answer is going to be different. Here is an example of an optimization job that I oversaw a few years ago and what I learned from it.

This particular client had performed dental work for a well known Playboy Bunny, Jenny McCarthy. He then took the initiative to work out a deal Ms. McCarthy to film her praising his work. Granted, not everyone is going to have this type of material to work with. Stay with me here though as I learned a lot from what happened next.

We started by loading the videos onto YouTube with the text of the dialog entered into the description and using the other optimization options available. We also wanted the client's website to benefit so we linked to it accordingly from YouTube. These were good moves.

Click on the graph image above. Jenny McCarthy has brought in 19,310 views to these videos thus far. That is a very decent amount of traffic for a dental testimonial.

There were things that did nothing for us though. For instance, I wanted the website to benefit from search traffic from these videos so the videos were also placed on the website. Nothing ever happened from this as any Google juice was given to YouTube and nothing applied to the website. The site's server logs only reported a handful of hits from the name Jenny McCarthy. Bummer. We could have applied different text for these videos on the site or not have placed them on YouTube, but I would argue that what we did worked well; sometimes one choice is not better, but simply provides different benefits.

In addition, the videos could have contained more "Call to Action" for redirecting people to the doctor's website. This is a touchy point. The client did benefit from our optimization work, but could we have done more? I am not certain since too much "Call to Action" becomes spam and people are quick to tune out obvious and/or overdone advertising. The trick here is to apply different tactics and see what happens. When too much tactic is applied the reports will show this and you can back off some. What works or does not work now may produce different results at another time, so keep trying and adjusting and even retrying things that may not have shown benefit earlier.

Another excellent lesson from this particular effort was the Viral marketing aspect. People subscribed to these videos. People left comments. We learned that the largest demographic was Males between the ages of 45-54 and that the entire world likes viewing Jenny McCarthy, although the USA was definitely the largest supplier of viewers. We also see from this graph that even though the videos have been online since November 2007, people are still viewing them 2 and half years later at a really steady rate. Above we noted that these videos were watched over 19 thousand times thus far. In this graph we see that those views were from 3805 visitors. People liked these videos enough that they re-watched them many times.

These are just a few observations from one job. You get the point though; SEO requires CONTINUED effort and experimentation and adjustment. If you mess up then learn from it and move on. Also understand that what works for one client may not be possible to apply for another; in this case Jenny McCarthy is probably not available for you and your advertising, but you can do something similar... or not...