Measuring the Success of Your SEO Efforts

[Advaliant Blogger]

Before starting any SEO project, I always recommend being perfectly clear on the overall goals you are trying to achieve. Are you looking for more leads, more sales, more traffic, branding — or do you simply want to show off high rankings for keyword X? Each site is a different, and I want to show you how to measure success depending on your own SEO goals.
Let’s say your primary goal is branding…
Perhaps you only care about the amount of traffic to the site because your blog makes ad dollars from page views. In this case, you need to fix your attention on simple metrics that you can gain from your analytics package: a) the amount of search traffic; b) the bounce rate of the search traffic; c) and the direct traffic.
Look for keywords that result in the highest number of visits and the lowest number of bounce rates. Despite what you may think, traffic with a 100% bounce rate is not even good for branding purposes. You need visitors that spend at least a few minutes and demonstrate a minimal level of interest in your content/offer. Also check to see if you are ranking on the first page for these keywords, and preferably above the fold (the first section of the page that does not require scrolling down). The difference in traffic generated between a #1 ranking and a #2 is usually tremendous.
A good way to measure the progress of your branding campaigns is to chart the increase in your direct traffic (people who type your URL into the address bar or arrive from a bookmark). Another important metric is the number of people that come to your site via brand searches (people who typed your company or site name into Google hoping to find you). Traffic coming from brand searches is usually the best converting traffic there is because these are visitors who have already expressed interest in your company or product. If you’re a merchant, don’t make the mistake of bidding in AdWords for brand searches. You should end up with the traffic anyways through organic SEO and it is not smart business to pay twice for the same visitor. However, if you’re an affiliate marketer, the situation is just the opposite. Some merchants don’t understand the process and still allow affiliates bid on brand terms. Some might even encourage it, and that allows you to make a lot of money. Take advantage of those few merchants while you still can!
Now, let’s say your primary goal is sales…
This has to be the goal of most affiliates and small business owners. When your primary goal is sales/conversions/actions, your first order of business is to set up conversion tracking properly. As an affiliate this can be tricky because the “thank you” page is under the merchant’s control. But in cooperation with your affiliate manager you might be able to get your tracking bugs installed on the merchant thank you page. Another alternative is to use your ad network tracking software, which often includes the capability of specifying your tracking bug on the affiliate backend. (I already suggested this feature to the team at Advaliant and I’m sure they will make it available in the next major update.) There is a more advanced technique that I sometimes use involving tracking IDs that I will explain in more detail in a future post.
Tracking conversions essentially means identifying the best keywords and the best sources of traffic so that you can adjust and improve your future traffic generation efforts. I like to set up PPC campaigns not just to drive traffic but also to use “broad match” to find lots of new keywords that I did not consider during my initial keyword research. Focus on the best-converting keywords and try to reach the top spots for them. Remember, the difference in traffic generated between a #1 ranking and a #2 is usually significant and worth your effort.
Final thoughts
Small things can produce big results, but in SEO it’s just as important to step back and look at the big picture. Tiny little tweaks like adding ALT descriptions to images is useful and necessary, but how many new visitors will you gain this way in comparison to the amount of visitors you would have gained by refocusing your keywords to ones with higher traffic and conversions?


Click here to read the rest...