Measuring The Success of Search Engine Optimization

Despite numerous cases of successful stories, a lot of businesses still think SEO is a lot of snake oil and wishful thinking. Or if not that, they still aren’t aware of how important search engine optimization is for an online business presence. For practitioners, you want to establish quantifiable goals and demonstrate results. Therefore, it is advised to keep things simple and focus on a baseline measurement of where you’re at before you begin any SEO campaign.

Knowing The Site’s Purpose and Creating a Baseline

Every site is created with a certain intention that plays part in the bigger SEO strategy. Thus, in order to measure how successful a website is, you need to know its purpose. For example, is it to..

• generate leads
• obtain sales
• link to another site
• or have specific articles read

From here you want to connect it with the direct drivers of your intended results. These include:

• total site traffic
• traffic per page and conversion rates per page
• keywords driving traffic and conversions
• traffic per keywords and conversion rate per keyword
• traffic of most popular page and its conversion rate

These parameters are merely guidelines that work best when combined with your main business goals and the results you hope to obtain. Understanding these metrics helps you to identify problems of your site, and can bring additional insight into your campaign.

Measuring the Efficacy of Your SEO

Measuring and demonstrating progress is important for external reporting, but SEO developers need to measure the effectiveness of what they’re doing and make adjustments if needed.

Much of this involves quantifying organic search data by search engine and keyboard, identifying which keywords are driving traffic through the search engine, and which sections of your site are leading to conversions.

Form here, you can identify pages the best and/or perform poorly, which pages are indexed or not indexed, and identifying any errors on the site or from external pages that link to your site.

Never forget, if you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it. What this means is that the data you mine must relate to the goals you’ve set yourself. Web analytics call this actionable key performance indicators (KPIS), or data that drives actionable responses.

Produce, Launch, Measure, Refine

Tracking your success requires 5 steps.

1. Produce your SEO campaign, set goals, ask yourself what you want to achieve, your strategy for doing so, and how you’ll measure your progress.
2. Establish a baseline and get the current stats on a site before you make any changes to your site.
3. Follow through your campaign. Add new pages, make desired changes, target markets, or whatever else you planned.
4. Next, collect all the data for each parameter you’re focusing on, after compare it to your baseline and assess your progress.
5. Now that the old data has been compared with the new data, you have a better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t. Make the needed changes, and refine your campaign. Drop what doesn’t work, and try something new.

If you want to know more about tracking your progress and measuring the success of your SEO campaign, contact us and consult one of our expert SEO practitioners.