OK, so the natural search engine optimisation campaign you have been running for the last 6 months is kicking in, traffic is through the roof. You're number one worldwide for your chosen search term and life looks good. Return to your office and prepare for success. When you built your website you had a goal in mind. In most cases success and cold hard cash featured strongly in the equation. After the site build many webmasters quite rightly turn their attention to search engine rankings, which in itself is a key performance indicator; however it isn't the final outcome. It's all too easy to forget what you're actually aiming for. Most commercial websites are built for one of the following goals:

• We want to sell items through the on-line shop
• We want to receive qualified enquiries from potential customers
• We want visitors to tell us their opinions
• We want visitors to request a brochure
• We want people to sign up for something

There are countless more possibilities, but the common factor here is that you're looking for a definable, countable result otherwise known as a conversion. And this is the point that many webmasters and internet marketing companies miss, conversion is far cheaper than gaining the traffic in the first place. Driving people to your website is very expensive in both time and money, but conversion can be boosted by relatively trivial tweaks. Even moving a checkout button an inch upwards, increasing the emphasis of a call-to-action or reducing the number of clicks to page delivery can all have significant impact.Q. So how do you improve conversions? A. Web analyticsWeb analytics are not just the pretty reports that end up in your inbox at the end of every month. Many webmasters and internet marketers don't spend enough time to understand the data. It isn't all about the number of "hits" or visitors; it is about how they have found the site, where they entered, where they go, how long they stay and where they leave.Our obsession with search engine ranking is distressingly obtuse. The key outcome is conversions, not where you appear in Google. Imagine searching for buried treasure on a South Pacific Island. The more holes you dig, the more chance you have of finding it. But if you don't know where to dig, or if you're even on the right island, that's an awful lot of effort for virtually no result.

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Matt Paines XSEO