Today I've been working on SEO for Shoppers' Lounge, an online classified ads site. As always, an obstacle presented itself: how do you gauge the performance of a site you have no analytics data for? Fortunately in this case the site owner had previously set up a Google Analytics account, so after some phonecalls I got access to all of the past data. This isn't always the case however. In previous projects, I've come up against issues such as a predecessor registering important company accounts to their personal email addresses, and taking all of the login details with them when they left. Unfortunately, in cases like that you're pretty much stuffed. Google's support is less than stellar, after a week or two of waiting I eventually got a response telling me to ask said predecessor for the login details, despite mentioning in the support ticket that they were long gone and uncontactable.
As a result, I set up an SEO department policy to group all logins for everything SEO-related into one company login. I also implemented a small database accessible by all SEO staff that lists all relevant details for current customers, including Google Analytics tracking IDs. Today's lesson is that logins like these aren't as irrelevant as losing your Facebook password, instead you're denying your company access to a lot of valuable data. Keep track of details, use consistent email addresses and so on, and most importantly share the knowledge among the whole department. If somebody leaves, there shouldn't be any loss of data. If you're a one man SEO department, you can still make efforts to preserve information, keep notes of whatever you do to aid whoever may join or replace you. When I started in this business I was grateful for whatever knowledge people could hand down to me, and I'm sure you were too.
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