Before you start any search engine optimization projects, it’s best to decide your business goals. For example, a goal would be to increase a non-branded search traffic by 35 percent. Now it’s time to think about ways to meet your goals and how your SEO team can meet them. To do this, you need to know how to measure your SEO efforts.
Clients will tell you they want to hit a certain ranking for a certain search term. Many products will help set up your rankings. However, these types of programs can scrape your search engine results, which is against the terms of service of search engines. Not to mention they focus on high volume terms, which only make up 10 percent or less of the total search volume. These rankings can also fluctuate for many reasons. It’s ok to check your rankings, but don’t solely base your measure of search engine optimization campaign success on that.
Non-branded search traffic is important because it factors out branded search traffic since few Web sites need search engine optimization help to rank for their brand name. This is because the most popular form of anchor text others use in implementing links to the site home page will be at the organizations name. This can get your irrelevant traffic to your site, so it’s better to evaluate that separately.
Visitor engagement, which includes bounce rate, time on site, and page views per visitor, are important things to keep track of. It’s important to include this when you’re measuring your SEO success.
Conversions will be the most important one to measure. This will tell you how your organic search traffic does in converting into business. The sales of a product is important for companies. Conversions, however, can include “contact us” requests, completed forms, widget downloads, visitors. Measuring traffic and engagement is important in any search engine optimization project, measuring your conversions from organic search traffic is the most important. For example, if your traffic increases by 50 percent and your conversions increase by 30 percent, the gain to your business is 30 percent since the conversions matter the most.