Measuring SEO Success

 

Having put a lot of time and effort into devising a SEO strategy, it is now time to measure how effective it actually was. To do this there are three key performance indicators (KPI) to look at; 

• Rankings
• Traffic
• Conversions

The information gathered from these KPIs can be used to both measure the success of this campaign and provide valuable information for future campaigns.

 

Rankings:

Keyword rankings are a key component of the SEO process with the websites who are listed on the first page receiving up to 92% of the traffic share (Searchengineland.com, 2012). Over time a business can track keywords and see how effective each are with the ability to change them at any time. Keyword analysis involves some trial and error as a business might find out overtime that a keyword is just too broad and competitive for their business to rank high for.

 

Traffic:

Having your site appear on the first page of a search engine isn’t enough to classify a SEO campaign as a success. The traffic volume and quality of a search term must also be analysed. Traffic volume should be measured based on the number of visits that come from organic search. With a successful SEO strategy, there should be a significant increase in organic search traffic over time.

How much traffic you should expect depends on the size of your target audience. For example, a successful SEO campaign that targets people who are looking for a nationwide online retailer will deliver significantly more organic search traffic than a successful campaign targeting people who are looking for a local hairdresser.

Within this volume of traffic, the quality of the traffic must also be analysed. Some areas of interest when determining the quality of such traffic include, pages per visit, average visit duration and bounce rate. You are essentially looking for a high average duration with a large amount of pages visited whilst keeping your bounce rate low.

Conversions:

Through web analytics you can determine what you consider to be a goal or a conversion. This could be something like a visitor completing a subscription form or contacting the business. When these conversions are set up by you, you can use Google Analytics to track and record each conversion as it happens. You can even track each page a visitor viewed leading up to the conversion to see what links they clicked on etc, this can be done with tools such as mouseflow. Sales aren’t essential from first time visitors, it is good to make them aware of your brand and have them complete some form of conversion which will keep you in their minds for future reference. After analysing your conversions you can also pinpoint which keywords from organic search results attracted each visitor.

Conclusion                                                                                                                                                

Tracking these KPIs will not only allow you to measure your SEO campaign’s current performance, but it will also provide you with vital data to help ensure your next campaign is a success. For more information on measuring SEO or any other marketing activities, please contact us            

How to Create Goals in Google Analytics

Before setting up goals in Analytics Google suggest that you ensure you have clarified the following:

• The name of the goal: Specify a name that you will clearly recognize when viewing the goals within each set of goals. This will cause less confusion and allow you to know exactly the goal that was achieved. For example name a goal ‘newsletter sign-up’ instead of just ‘newsletter’. This way its very clear to all viewers.
• The value of the goal: Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, Average Score, and other metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. For example, if your sales team can close 10% of people who submit contact forms, and your average transaction is €200, you might assign €20 to your “Contact Form Submitted” goal. Similarly if only 2% of newsletter signups result in a sale, you might only allocate €4 to this goal.