I cant tell you how many times I have worked with clients whose ecommerce platform is either totally incapable of being optimized for SEO or is severly limited.  Heck, in some cases, we can’t even get basic Google analytics tags installed!

I  hate to name names but one of the worst systems I have seen to date is Miva Merchant.  Several developers I have worked with absolutely hate the software, saying it is ‘a bunch of crap…’ and basically they are not even able to add a basic Google analytics sitewide tag, and asking them to add the commerce tracking tag or even the basic Google conversion tag (which is so so basic) was simply impossible to do!

How do these vendors expect their customers to run ecommerce business using a software platform that doesnt even allow for web analytics and tracking?  I have basically had to tell several clients that I couldnt help them, as much as I wanted the business, I cant really conduct online marketing programs if I cant even have analytics in place.

Other clients have come to me with inhouse/homebuilt commerce systems, again with some real fundamental problems like not being able to have customized page titles or meta information for each page!  Or using session ID’s in the URLs….

I guess I am just upset that these customers basically are SOL and will likely have to migrate to a new platform..

I have been thinking of better ways of figuring out what the ‘intent’ of the search visitor is. What has always been hard for me in search engine marketing is making that leap of faith when matching a keyword to a client’s product or offering. Is the customer really searching for what we are selling? For example, if the query is for “chemical warning labels”, is the searcher’s intent to buy warning labels for their hazardous chemicals or are they simply searching for information about warning labels on their child’s medicine?

I am going to try using some of the Google analytics parameters to help me evaluate that in some sort of quantitative sense as follows:

• Segment keywords by page view per visit
• Segment keywords by % exit ratio

My theory is that keywords that consistenly show a small page view/visit ratio (say <1.5:1 or so) probably are not relevant to my offerings. If the keyword intent was correct, why didnt they view more of the site? The same argument could be made with the exit ratio. If a keyword consistently shows a high exit ratio (assuming I have selected the most relevant landing page I can), then again, probably the searcher intent is not matching with my offer.

Tracking search engine optimization ‘campaigns’ or results is not even close to being as easy as tracking and monitoring paid search advertising results. Why? Well, just think for a minute. With PPC, you define exactly which keywords you want to advertise, what matching options, etc. then you define what search engines and even what campaign and ad group names. And you can insert tracking codes into the query strings on the ad URL’s to provide your analytics engine with exactly where that visitor came from and what their actual keyword query was. The beauty of PPC is that you have already defined up front what campaign or category that keyword belongs to. Thus, instead of looking at each keyword and how it is doing, a daunting task, you can monitor at a more macro level, the campaign or ad group level, then troubleshoot and go down to more detail from there.

But, what about SEO? You get thousands of inbound organic keyword searches a month, with visitors using phrases you never, ever optimized for. How do you even ‘allocate’ or define what campaign an organic keyword belongs to? With SEO, you optimize specific pages on your site for a handful of keywords but what keywords organic visitors use if never known until you view your web logs or analytics tool. The difficulty is then sifting through these thousands of organic keywords and figuring out what ‘campaign’ or keyword category they belong to so you can have a more macro view to analyze. Otherwise, how do you determine how you are doing with your SEO?