Developing a game plan for real estate analytics

One difference I see between a lot of us site owners/webmasters and professional SEOs is that we check our results in the search engines much more often than if we hired someone like REW to do it for us.  If there was one thing I should change about my current method of working on my site it would be to put more scheduled activities in place.  On the one hand it is nice that if I see an interesting site to explore or if an issue to blog about comes up at the last minute - I can chose to do it instead of or addition to whatever else I'm working on, however, it is not very efficient and as I keep saying - I'm soon going to have a second site to work on as well as multiple blogs - efficiency is quickly becoming more important.

I typically work with a lot of windows open on the computer so I'll often have hittail open and I will end up checking it several times during the day.  In my opinion this is a bad habit (just closed that window).  While it is important to know where visitors are coming from, checking multiple times is not a very efficient use of time or resources - yes it is fun to see how many people are visitng but I've come to believe that with constant checking some bigger trends might be missed.

So what might be a more realistic schedule to check both rankings and analytics?  Again, if I were paying someone to monitor this for me,  every other week might be ideal - some might even say once a month or even once a quarter would be enough.  Going from checking every day to once a quarter is not realistic so maybe a first step would be to check weekly for a while.

What should we be checking?  I love hittail but I probably don't use it in the right way - I typically will click a result to see where it falls in the search engine - even if it is a longtail result - lately I've really been interested in watching individual IDX detail pages - not because the same pages come up a lot but just to monitor trends - do MLS# results show up higher than addresses?  If a user types the address a certain way, does it come up higher in the search results - all interesting things but one that I have no direct control over because the IDX pages on my site are set up on the REW side.  So if it isn't the actual placement in the search engines - maybe the trends we should focus on would be to monitor increase in traffic - google analytics makes that easy to check on a monthly basis - I've been working hard to increase traffic to my site and sometimes forget when I've had some month over month increases of 40-50% that is actually a big accomplishment.

Analyzing individual phrases or topics that come up is a great way of finding things to blog about.  Morgan has been talking about blogalytics here for a long time.  Instead of just checking how individual phrases are ranking on the web, write about issues visitors are interested in.

Of course analytics are an important way to guage how certain keywords are doing in the search engines - but beyond just how a keyword ranks - is how users respond to the site once they get there.  I have a couple of keywords that rank well and get traffic but I have not figured out a good way to get those users to stay on my site.  The page they land on doesn't really fit what they are looking for and they leave.  If I can figure out how to make that page fit better, and keep those users on my site - I've made important improvements without even increasing existing traffic.

The key point I wanted to make was that many of us site owners are likely checking our analytics information too often.  We need to keep in mind what would be reasonable and what we would expect if we were paying someone for this service.  I've closed hittail on the computer and may try to keep it closed until next Thursday - probably won't be able to go that long - but I can at least try...

Hittail is no longer free for new users but has a minimal monthly fee.  I feel has enough value that it should be used on real estate sites.  Google analytics is free and is essential in my opinion.  Both are very easy to configure on the backend of any real estate webmaster site.

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