Progress over time: The law of diminishing returns?

I haven't posted for a little while. Partly this is a result of other activities keeping me busy partly reflecting about the graphs below.

Essentially, I think all our optimisation efforts are hitting a point of diminishing returns.

Graph 1 below shows the percentage of traffic generated from a range of sources over the last 12 months. Amongst other things it shows a useful reduction in reliance on pay per click advertising and people knowing about the site and entering the name directly (probably mostly staff). It also shows that over time search engines are now bringing in 60% of all traffic while directories and other related sites are bringing in a lesser proportion of visitors (although in absolute terms the numbers are up).

Graph 2 shows relative performance against a baseline of 12 months ago ie today our traffic numbers and total pages visited is nearly 60% more than a year ago. This is quite an improvement. Total visitors and pages viewed track closely as over time the number of pages viewed per unique visitor has not changed significantly. Unfortunately the other trend that can be observed from the graph is that the rate of improvement is slowing down - we are getting less improvements from our incremental effort.

Perhaps we are reaching the point where incremental effort is not justified. Overall ranking on search engines etc is improving as is shown by the relative improvement in traffic generated. There is still more work that can be done there but perhaps a fundamental shift to our approach is required to lift performance to another level. Have you experienced this phenomenon with your web optimisation effort? What did you do to break out of these limits?

Benchmarking website performance

So you have done a few things to your website, your ranking quite highly and now you are trying to work out whether it is worth putting in any extra effort?

The answer is benchmarking your performance against your peers. Are they doing any better than you?

You may have to reach out a bit further than those you know directly compete - perhaps you need to look at your peers in another State or country that you don't directly compete with. Perhaps a more populous or IT progressive State or country? If in Australia, the UK and the US are good spots to find organisations that might have a more competitive market than ours who can provide you with a valuable role model.

After a bit of searching I was lucky enough to find not only a competitor in an adjacent market but one who's SEO firm kindly put up what they managed to achieve. Now I know what can be achieved! While the market is not exactly the same and the organisation performs slightly different services we have a range of useful stats to think about:

• Page 1 Google ranking for at least 5 key terms - 4 of which are directly relevant.
• 7,000+ visits per month (we have about 1,200)
  
• 95% of website traffic from organic search (remember my splits from the previous posting)
• 4-5 page views per visit (we have 3.8)
  
• and most importantly of all 85% of all new patient enquiries coming from the website. (I don't have this statistic but still working on the data collection side - anecdotally I'd say it is about 30%).

The challenge has been set. Can I learn enough to meet and exceed these metrics? If so, perhaps I should charge $4,000 a pop for my search optimisation skills.

Other benchmarking services

There are also other tools for benchmarking including in Google Analytics. See Visitors then Benchmarking. You can select your category provided you agree to share your data with Google. At the moment not too many people must be using the service because the graphs of average performance are much more peaky than you'd expect of an average - 300% growth on one day across the category on the web. Bear in mind the tool only looks at your results comparing you to similar performing websites. The advantage of this is you get a more accurate picture of your performance in your category but at the same time you don't know how well the 'big boys' are doing until you reach the lower ends of their performance category.