I enjoyed reading through the new report from Conversion.com and econsultancy based on research they carried out to understand the big trends in e-commerce and specifically focusing on attitudes to testing and experimentation.
One particular part caught my eye and I thought I would repurpose (with permission) some of their research and data to illustrate a point that I found interesting.
The original report contains this chart:
I was immediately struck by the big gap in the organic search line – it is the channel that has by some margin the biggest number of e-commerce companies which simultaneously rely on the channel and do not test to improve and understand their performance in this area. (And this accepts at face-value the claim by 29% of respondents that they do test organic search which is high, from my experience).
Regular readers will be unsurprised to hear that I’m interested in this given the huge investment we have been making into making SEO testable and quantifiable. So having noticed this tidbit, I reworked that chart to order by the gap and got this:
We very often hear from our clients and customers that they are under significant pressure in the business to measure and justify organic SEO investments. If you find yourself repeatedly having conversations where your boss asks how are you measuring the value of these on-site SEO changes? Or do you know which of the investments we are making in on-site SEO are paying off?
(Or if you’re the boss and you don’t know the answers to these questions).
Then maybe it’s time to check out the latest thinking in SEO split-testing – drop us a line and we’ll be happy to show you how it works.