How Can You Measure Success?
It is a known fact that what we guys do in the SEO world isn’t clear to many people, and it’s increasingly important to ensure that you are able to establish goals and demonstrate the results to your clients. This will give your client peace of mind that they made the right decision to invest in SEO, and that the campaign is bringing them a ROI.
Tools such as Google Analytics can provide an array of valuable data. Other tools for finding long tail search terms, discovering new links, and software to determine the best links your competitors have will help with the overall process. It’s simple; you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
Before finding the best tools out there, it is vital to establish the best measurement to track your progress to report back to your client. For example, most retail business will find comparing month to month results one of the most important pieces of data. Basically, before measuring the success of a client, you need to define the purpose of the client’s website and why they have invested in SEO, this could include;
- Generating Sales
- Leads
- Obtaining donations
- Getting people to read specific articles
All of the above would be good objectives for the client to have, that can relate the business with the goals of the site. This is closely connected to the drivers of the results including;
- Site Traffic – including traffic to the most popular pages
- Keywords driving the traffic and the conversion rate
- Traffic per page – what is the conversion rate per page?
- Traffic per keyword – what is the conversion rate per keyword?
The crucial measurements that we should put in place should be the ones able to measure the results of the main business goals. Defining a clear path towards your client’s goals is crucial, although over time, goals may change and you will need to adapt.
It is important
that you can establish the basic data points for the website which could include;
- Identifying poorly performing pages and being able to identify the best performing pages also.
- Tracking search engine crawler activity
- Identifying 404 error pages and external sites linking to these pages
- Determining if the clients best-selling product pages are getting search traffic, and more importantly the right search traffic
- Which keywords are driving the most traffic by search engine?
- Quantifying data on the conversions by both search engine and keyword traffic.
Furthermore, targeting the client’s objectives, measuring progress and being able to externally report is the key to a successful campaign – you need to be able to manage expectations and deliver these successfully.
