One of the biggest
challenges you might find, is in figuring out whether your SEO campaigns are
succeeding or failing. SEO measurement not only involves the analysis of basic
metrics like traffic resulting from organic search engines and specific
keywords, but it also requires a holistic approach to measuring business
outcomes and making adjustments based on data.
If
you've never paid attention to SEO before, there are some basic things you'll
need to have checked off your list. Before you can do anything you need to make
sure that you have an analytic solution installed something like Google analytics, Adobe omniture sitecatalyst, web trends
or core metrics will do
the job. You want to invest some time and resources into making sure that your
web analytics tracking is implemented and configured properly and recording
data accurately. This means that you'll probably need to go beyond slapping
some JavaScript on your pages and at a minimum you need to configure your
analytic solution to track goals and business outcomes. But the sky is a limit
on what you can track these days, ensuring a robust and complete implementation
will make your data trustworthy enough that you can use it to make confident
evidence-based decisions.
Once
you're collecting the data, you'll need to define your business objectives and
the key performance indicators or KPI's new used to measure them. For example,
you might want people to submit a contact form on your website, in that case
you can configure your analytic solution to track that is a conversion action
and you might look at KPI's like the number of conversions that occur and the
conversion rate. This is just one example but remember you'll have lots of
goals for your website, and that means you have lots of KPI's to continually
monitor and improve upon. You also want to establish some SEO specific APIs
that can help you understand how your SEO efforts are paying off; things like
organic search traffic or visits to your website from search engines that are
not generated by paid search but organic listings. Your total organic search
traffic compared to a previous timeframe, like month over month or
year-over-year. Non-branded keywords searches or searches were your brand or
your business name was not part of the search term, and target keyword rankings
or how well you rank for each of your target keywords.
While
this last one might not be available in your standard analytics reports there
are plenty of tools out there that can automate the monitoring of keyword
rankings over time. Anyone working in SEO that worth their paycheck, should be
keeping an eye on these metrics at a minimum, but this is really just
scratching the surface. While attracting traffic your website through your SEO
program is certainly important. You also need to see what the traffic is
actually doing once they get your site. When you analyze traffic that comes
from a certain search engine as a result of a certain keyword search and lands
on a certain landing page, you should also start to look at how that traffic
converts on your business goals. if you're an e-commerce situation than you
should obviously be looking at things like revenue, average order, volumes and
other transactional data. But even if you don't sell your products online you
still got lots of things to track. You can look at lead to come in the form of
newsletter subscribers, social followers, event or demonstration sign-ups,
driving directions to your brick-and-mortar store, contact forms or anything
else you can dream of. In these days there lots of analytics solutions allow
you to track phone calls back to the source of traffic as well.
Make
sure that your measuring all of these important business goals, so that you can
look at the conversions and conversion rates from the traffic your SEO is
generating. Ensuring that your
collecting the right data, reporting on your KPI's in a meaningful way and
analyzing the data to really understand what's happening with your SEO strategy
is a foundation, but just looking at the data doesn't change anything.
Measuring
and improving your SEO over time is a continuous cycle of measurement learning
and taking action. You have to use the data to learn what changes you can make
your strategy, and once you've made those changes you'll start the cycle over
again by measuring whether or not those changes produced an improvement. Until
you reach perfection, there's always something you can be doing better in a
data-driven measurement plan for your SEO will have you on the path to
continuous improvement
If you would like to know How to Analyze backlinks to your webpages Check Out My New Post On Analyzing Backlinks To your Webpages
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