7 Ways To Measure Your SEO
By Anna Johnson on June 11th, 2009MarketingSherpa recently interviewed three search engine optimization (SEO) experts to get their views on how to best measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign.
The SEOs interviewed came up with seven (7) tactics. Check out the article for the details but here is my take on the 7 ways you can measure your SEO efforts:
- Assess how much organic search traffic you’re getting from your targeted keywords. If you use Google Analytics or a similar tool, it will display the keywords used by search engine users to arrive on your website.
- Match organic search traffic to changes (e.g. keyword optimization changes) made on your website. This will indicate which changes are having the most impact.
- Evaluate SEO in terms of meaningful metrics. Ranking highly in the search engines is nice, but generating qualified traffic and converting a good deal of that traffic into paying customers is likely to be much better. Consequently, you’ll want to understand the relationship between a given keyword ranking and the traffic and conversions this ranking generates. For one thing, you’ll want to know if that keyword is, in fact, yielding the qualified traffic you want.
- Compare your organic search metrics to your general website metrics. Significant differences and trends between the two will help you isolate the impact of your SEO campaign. For example, if your traffic or conversions from natural search have increased much more than your traffic and conversion from other sources, you’ll know your SEO strategy is working.
- Track offline conversions from SEO efforts. If you have an offline business presence, then you’ll want to know if your online SEO campaign is delivering offline conversions. To this end, work out ways you can identify offline conversions from SEO. This may involve, for example, requiring someone to fill in a specific form or quote a particular code when they go to purchase from you.
- Scrutinize poorly performing keywords. If you’re targeting keywords that are under performing, assess whether they are the right keywords for you, or whether there are other problems in the process from keyword search… to landing page arrival… to purchase… to post-purchase, and so on… that may be undermining their performance.
- Monitor links to see the growth (or non-growth) in sites linking to your site. Since backward links impact on your search engine ranking, you’ll want to know if you initiatives to get links are working.
Source: MarketingSherpa, “How to Measure SEO Effectively: 7 Tactics,” MarketingSherpa, June 02, 2009
