Two years ago, I wrote a blog post on Blue Magnet Interactive’s blog regarding SEO and how it is a process and not a destination. You don’t just do SEO once and call it good. You do SEO consistently.
I compared doing SEO to sailing in the post? Why sailing? I really don’t know. I don’t sail, so most of my information about sailing comes from pirate movies and the imagined conversations between America’s Cup winners. In movies, they are always adjusting sails, tacking back and forth to eventually reach their location – Tortuga usually.
Any analogy is flawed and I am reluctant to rely upon them for too long in explaining something like SEO because ultimately, SEO is SEO and it isn’t much like sailing. My fear is a person who is both a sailor and a person knowledgeable in SEO will come along and blow the analogy out of the water (see what I did there?). She will point out there are automated systems on sailboats and there isn’t that much adjusting of sails. My goal in the piece was to get people thinking about their optimization in terms of a daily/weekly activity.
Every day, a website generates data. People visit the website and interact with it leaving behind all sorts of data. Most of it is just standard noise. Some of it is signal – the stuff that needs to be paid attention to. Maybe people are landing on a page and clicking away because it is taking too long to load, doesn’t meet their search expectations, or something else entirely. How long will you let that page offend visitors? Catching it sooner than later is important.
Anyway, two years ago I covered 6 reports/metrics in the blog post… wasn’t sure what to call them as a whole – reports or metrics. Some are just measurements – metrics. Some are reports. I will update these reports and metrics soon. Over the past 2 years, getting feedback from clients, I’ve learned more about what businesses need in terms of data to make appropriate decisions.
Most of the SEO blogging I do is for my day job, but whenever possible, I will update this blog.