As business continue to flock to online marketing mediums from the more traditional like Yellow Pages and News Paper advertising, there seems to be a large proportion of businesses that are still unable to come to grips with the best method in which to measure the success of their SEO campaign. There are three methods which we commonly find clients using to measure their campaign (if they do at all)
Keywords Rankings
Traffic Volume
ROI
Each method has distinct advantages and disadvantages….
Keyword Rankings
The majority of SEO campaigns will be centred around a set of pre determined keywords, usually between 5-15 however this may be larger for bigger organisations or those with a divers product portfolio. The majority of SEO firms will provide a periodic report including the ranking of the clients keywords within a number of major search engines and their movement from the previous result. The problem with only measuring a small number of keywords is that it really does not give an overall indication of progress, while the client site may only pick up a SERP position or two over the allotted time period the site may in fact gather ranking positions for a number of additional untargeted however valuable keywords.
The above image is extracted from one of our sites and an internal monitoring application which we use to track Search Traffic trends, the coloured segments represent traffic from target keywords, the Grey (almost 95%) represents traffic from other keywords. This site receives in excess of 2000UV per day across over 700 unique keywords and has aprox 120,000 pages currently indexed in Google. As you can see the absolute majority of traffic is generated by keywords other than those specifically targeted, tracking keyword rank for a set of 10 keywords would not paint an accurate picture of Search Presence Performance.
Traffic Volume
Based on the above data it seems pertinent to track the total number of people visiting the site in a given time period and compare that to the previous time period, in the case of the site above we are seeing month-to-month growth of 16%, a very health growth rate for any business. In the case of a site which derives the majority of its revenue or value via advertising, then the traffic volume is a good measure of campaign performance. That is, a site that sells banner space at a price of $4 CPM and grows at a constant rate of 16% would increase its revenue by a factor of 5 each year.
The issue with measuring traffic volume is not all traffic is created equally, some sources and keywords will refer traffic that is unlikely to convert into a sale or lead for your business, similarly other traffic sources will send highly qualified traffic that can convert as well as 1:2. For this reason the majority of business should not asses their campaign performance based solely on incremental traffic growth.
ROI
The best manor in which to asses your site and SEO campaigns performance is by pure ROI tacking. That is, how much money did I or my business derive as a result of our SEO campaign. The unfortunate situation is that ROI is actually the hardest metric for us to measure – as there are very few manors in which we can capture the resulting actions of our new website visitors (unless your using the ZNS CPA campaigns). Business owners need to be meticulous in the measurement of and recording of their lead sources this includes verifying the source of leads who contact you via phone, email or walk in. Once you put in place a reporting and measurement system for recording the sources of your new clients you will likely be surprised by the ROI of your SEO campaign, we have had clients report up to a 4,600% ROI from SEO within the first 12 months. Just think, if you gave us $10,000 now on the condition we give you back $460,000 at the years end, is that a deal you would take?
To increase your websites ROI, get in contact with ZNS today.