The Real Way to Measure SEO Success - Resultfirst.com

1. The Real Way to Measure SEO Success

2. Introduction Comprehending the finer lines encrypted in SEO performance reports and dashboards can be an ordeal, especially if time is a rare commodity. Although SEO agencies do strive to maintain complete transparency ensure that the clients are fully aware of how their investment is working for their business; in most scenarios, it is not really the case with most investors being unsure about the exact impact of their SEO investment on their overall business. For instance, selling a product a day might be the target of a retail website. Hence, even a single visit may suffice. On the other hand, for a website dedicated to lead generation, the number would just not be enough. Therefore, you need to consider all the relevant factors, including the time you have been investing in SEO, when evaluating the success of your SEO campaign. and The effect of SEO activities is quite gradual, which makes measuring the ROI even more challenging. In fact, in most cases, the ROI can be negligible during the first few months of SEO, but a year afterwards, the returns can be really handsome. In other words: in order to make the most of SEO – persistence is the Solomon’s key! Although solutions such as Google Analytics, Clicky, etc. do come in handy in evaluating the performance of an SEO campaign; however, all such tools demand a certain level of technical expertise and may also set you back by a couple of hundred dollars, if your requirements are intense. Therefore, unless you are sure of what you are getting into, investing in paid web analytics solutions is plainly unadvisable. The need to measure the ROI of SEO remains intact at all stages of the campaign. Whether you have recently started with SEO or have been doing it for a while, it is extremely important to ensure the efforts are aligned to meet your organization’s long and short term objective. For those who are new to SEO and web analytics, the BIG question is always – where to start? When it comes to measuring SEO success, there is no universal solution or set of rules. That’s because the measurement depends on various dynamic factors, including the size, nature and objectives of your website and business, and of course, the behavior and expectations of the target audience; not to mention, the value you promise to your end customers. unfortunately, approach Let’s begin by laying the foundation for call - “The Real Way to Measure SEO Success”. what we

3. The Basics In order to get a clear picture of your SEO campaign’s progress, it is vital to get acquainted with the fundamental metrics and what they mean to SEO performance. The metrics are:  Ranking  Traffic  Conversion RANKING Chances are that you will come across the term ‘baseline ranking’ several times during the preliminary stages of SEO implementation. Simply put, a website’s baseline rankings can be defined as its search engine placement on the target keywords before SEO. Although higher search placement definitely means better exposure for your website, the improvement in rankings, however, may not ensure higher conversions. In other words, attaining higher search engine placement is just half the job done! The purpose of SEO, unlike common perception, goes way beyond improving the search placement of your website; it is to optimize the value generated by organic traffic. TRAFFIC Your website can receive visitors from multiple sources. If you notice any improvement in the volume of traffic received by you website, find out the contribution of the number of visits attributable to organic search though Google Analytics. For ensuring higher conversion, it is important to assess the quality as well as volume of traffic received by your website, taking into account all key metrics, including the average number of pages viewed by a visitor, average duration of a visit, and of course, the bounce rate. Although any increase in number of site visitors does indicate positive progress, it doesn’t always mean higher conversion. In fact, it may mean just the opposite, as it is usually the case in wrongly targeted marketing campaigns. CONVERSION This is unarguably the most important aspect of you SEO campaign. Simply put, it is the ratio of visitors converting into customers. There can be a scenario where your site gets to the first page on all keywords and start to receive a decent volume of traffic, without any end success. But what does “success” actually mean? The “success” or conversions can be classified into two categories - micro and macro. Let us look closer at what they mean.

4. MACRO When a visitor action accomplishes any of the core objectives of the website, it is regarded as a macro conversion. The exact definition of a macro conversion depends on the goals of the website. For instance, receipt of a successful payment is a macro conversion for a retail website. Some examples of macro conversions:  E-commerce order completion  Paid subscription sign up  Application submission  Member sign up MICRO Micro conversions refer to important actions taken by site visitors that either lead to a macro conversion or help accomplish any of the secondary objectives of the website. A micro conversion can be construed when a visitor:  Enters the checkout process  Subscribes to receive newsletters  Subscribes RSS feed  Downloads info  Fills our Contact Us form  Takes a social action  Views videos Any online conversion, macro or micro, has to go through a multi-stage conversion funnel that usually looks something like this: DISCOVERY UNDERSTANDING CONSIDERATION CONVERSION A user discovers your website through search, social, referring links, etc. Understands your offerings using the content present on the website. Decides whether there is need of the products or services on offer. Completes a key action on the site aligned with any of your goals. If you want repeat business, make sure the conversion funnel is supplemented by competent customer service and retention strategies.

5. Performance Evaluation RANKING Nobody wants to be the host of a party where no one came! Although any improvement in search ranking is always a welcome change, you need to look beyond that: find out how the improvement translates into increased inflow of qualified visitors. Even with page 1 placement, your website may not lead you closer to your goals. This usually happens due to either of the following reasons, or both:  Low volume keywords  Website deficiency (design/content/feature)  Lack of optimization To yield maximum return on your SEO investment, it is important to closely evaluate all the keywords being targeted and find out the exact volume and quality of the traffic attracted by each. This evaluation will help you to segregate the keywords that are worthy of intensified efforts from those that must be dropped from the campaign. TRAFFIC When evaluating website traffic, it is important to determine the source of website traffic. These include:  Direct Traffic: Typed in traffic, bookmark visits, etc.  Referral Traffic: External links, email, promotion & branding links, etc.  Search Traffic: Traffic directed by web search engines POSSIBLE SCENARIOS The average number of pages viewed per visit is low despite a respectable traffic volume. In such a scenario, there can be four possible reasons:  Less number of pages  Weak interlinking  Poor navigational structure  Irrelevant content on inner pages If the average duration of a visit is unreasonably low, you are looking at the following possible reasons:  Unfriendly/outdated design  Less number of pages  Less content  Irrelevant information  Irrelevant traffic  Website deficiency If the bounce rate of your website is unusually high, there can be three probable causes:  Irrelevant traffic  Website deficiency  Single page website

6. CONVERSION Even the websites receiving large number of visitors may have to deal with low conversions. Broadly classifying, the reasons for this can be internal or external. INTERNAL  Poor description of products or services  Lack of flexibility for customers  Complex conversion funnel  No clear call-to-action  Lack of eloquence  Lack of a retention strategy  Technical errors deflecting users  High pricing EXTERNAL  Inapt keywords  Inaccurate marketing focus  Poor branding  Payment gateway errors Therefore, if the conversion rate of your website is not in proportion with the number of visitors, you need to closely evaluate the aforementioned factors. DOWN TO BUSINESS! Now that we are through with the fundamentals, here is how you need to go about measuring the success of your SEO campaign: Creating a Measurement Model IDENTIFY SITE OBJECTIVES Start by identifying the core objectives of your website. What is it that you want your website to do for you? The choices include:  Engage prospects  Sign up visitors for your newsletter  Sell a product or service  Collect visitor information through online form  Call you Outlining the core objectives will not only help you to evaluate the success of your SEO campaign, but also to ensure that all marketing and promotional efforts are rightly channeled.

7. IDENTIFY KPIs ‘Key Performance Indicators’, or KPI for short, is probably the most revered jargon thrown around in the world of digital marketing. In simple terms, Key Performance Indicators are the metrics for measuring the success of a particular activity. In case of SEO, performance indicators depend on the goals of your website. For instance, the KPIs for an ecommerce website will be quite different from the KPIs for an online business directory. Therefore, in order to measure the success of your SEO campaign and its impact on your overall business, start by identifying the key performance indicators of your website. These may include unique visits, visitor signups, click through rate, etc. In order to determine the KPIs, you need to be absolutely clear about what’s most important for your business and its objectives. In addition, KPIs are to be defined in a manner that not only provides meaningful information, but also ensures easy measurability. The Key Performance Indicators of a website may include:  Conversion rate of target keywords  Bounce rate  Average time spent by a visitor  Traffic sources  Visitor loyalty When evaluating KPIs, it is important to determine the exact contribution of organic traffic in the accomplishment of the various goals. To get a clear picture, you can use Google Analytics or refer to the reports provided by your SEO agency. THE FORMULA How you calculate the actual return on your SEO investment depends on the primary objective(s) of your website. The options include: RANKING-BASED CALCULATION In most cases, better search placement translates into enhanced exposure, which in turn paves way for enhanced business growth. However, the actual impact of better ranking on your overall business may vary. Hence, ranking-based evaluation is usually practiced for websites with the primary aim to attract new visitors. To explain the evaluation method, let’s say the primary goal of a website is to generate sales leads. You invest $3,000 in SEO over a period of three month, which results in notable improvements in the search placement of your website on target keywords. Consequently, the number of leads generated also increases; 1st month - 1200, 2nd month - 1400, and 3rd month -1600. A simple rule to evaluate the return would be to divide the amount spent, i.e. $3000 by the increase in the number of conversions, which is 1200. In other words, for every $2.5 spent on SEO, you received one qualified lead.

8. TRAFFIC-BASED CALCULATION If the primary aim of a website is to create brand awareness or reach a larger number of prospective customers, traffic-based calculation can be a viable option. Here is how you need to go about calculating your ROI on SEO based on the improvement in traffic. Let’s say your website traffic for the month before procuring SEO service was 10,000. You invest $2,000 in SEO and the traffic increases to 14,000. Doing the math, for every dollar spent on SEO, your site received two more visitors. However, this method is not applicable to websites with multistage conversion funnel, as such websites are more concerned about conversions than increase in site traffic. CONVERSION-BASED CALCULATION Another option to measure ROI of SEO is by placing the revenue generated by organic traffic against the cost incurred. Let us take a hypothetical scenario to better understand this method. Say, your SEO spend amounted $1,000 over a period of 3 months. During the same period, the profit generated by organic traffic increased from $10,000 to $13,000. In other words, you spent $1,000 and received an increase of $3,000. In this case, the return on investment would be (3000/1000)*100, or 300 percent. Conclusion Though remarkably simple, all these methods of calculating ROI have certain limitations. One – they don’t take into account those visitors who discover your website through organic search, but do not go all the way to the end of the conversion funnel. However, they return to your website later to complete a conversion. Such customers are considered ‘direct traffic’ by Google Analytics and other tools and therefore the monetary benefit of the conversion is not attributed to SEO, which should ideally be the case. Another downside to these methods is that they don’t take into account all the future business that you would get from acquisitions made through organic search. In a lot of cases, people discover a website through search engines and become regulars. Hence, considering the revenue generated by a conversion in a limited timeframe doesn’t really give an inaccurate depiction of the ROI. Hence, in order to get a precise evaluation of your return on SEO investment, focus on the improvements made in the KPIs of your website. If you have had a tough time measuring the ROI of your SEO initiatives, work with an agency that understands the objectives of your business and ensures that your investment is channeled towards their accomplishment.

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