Lately I have been asked to find a new metric (or few) to measure some of my current SEO campaigns, to identify our SEO performance. In the past, the clients were quite satisfied with the keyword rankings and site traffic, however they are becoming more sophisticated. They need to see more metrics to define the success (value) of their SEO campaigns.
As a SEO specialist (SEO expert or whatever you name yourself), it’s important to be able to provide your clients with the results of all your analytic data. Sometimes, it’s even more important to offer few recommendations once a week or maybe two. Regardless of the type of industry you are in or the type of client you are dealing with, their SEO Success Metrics are always 5 things:
- Measuring Visitor Traffic – Here you need to compare current site traffic to the baseline to see if there is a net gain or loss.
- Measuring Keyword Ranking – Like what we used to do, measuring keyword rankings usually requires you to compare clients’ keyword rankings to your baseline report to see if there if a net increase or decrease
- Measuring Increased Coverage
– Number of total Pages Indexed
– Number of keywords driving traffic - Measuring Increase in other areas
– Goolge PageRank (some people tend to ignore this, however I personally believe it’s always good to hear sth good. If the PR is going up. Why not mention it?)
– Number of inboundLinks (this is the place where you demonstrate your linkbuilding efforts and the site’s current link popularity)
– Crawl frequency (how search engine friendly your site is. ex. do your on-site optimization recommendations work? ) - Measuring Conversion/ Leads – Again, compare to your baseline report. Client will definitely be happy to know the revenue increases, however keep this in mind, conversion is not always about revenue (as least for SEOs). Sometimes emails, phone calls, sign-up members…etc.