You know that search engine ranking for your web site can change from
week to week. Those changes can be caused by competition, modifications
to search algorithms, and changes to your web site. To maintain your top
ranking, you must constantly monitor and make changes to your web site.
It’s through this monitoring that you’ll also be able to see how successful your SEO efforts are. And
measuring the success of those efforts is essential to keeping you on the right track.
Before you can begin to analyze what you’re doing right and wrong in SEO, you first need to know
what to expect. Realistic expectations will keep your view of your SEO results realistic as well. SEO
is not the only answer for your web site, but it can help improve your site traffic and conversions if
you are patient and understand how to leverage your SEO expectations.
SEO timeline
The first expectation that you’ll probably have to rein in is the SEO timeline. Many people implement
some aspect of SEO and expect to see results overnight. Obviously, paid results are going to
be profitable faster than true SEO efforts, but either way, SEO can still be a long process. It can take
anywhere from a few months to more than a year to start seeing solid rankings and targeted traffic.
You’ll have to be patient to be rewarded for your SEO efforts. And of course the actual time frame
to see the full results will vary according to the keywords you’re using and the state of your web
site when you begin your optimization process.
Whether you’ve hired an SEO consulting firm or are doing it in-house, you have to be involved in
your SEO efforts from start to finish — and because the end never arrives that means you have to
be involved always. Become a champion of SEO and help the others in your organization to understand
and value the results that SEO efforts provide.
This applies even if you’ve hired a company to do the majority of the tasks needed for successful site
optimization. You have responsibilities in the client/customer relationship. Your most important
responsibility is to communicate what you need from the SEO company and what your goals for site
optimization are. You also have a responsibility to stay involved in the SEO process, so that you
know where your optimization efforts are, and where they are going, what works, and what needs to
be changed, tweaked, or abandoned altogether. Your participation in your SEO program will ensure
that you know what’s going on, where you are, and what your SEO company is doing for you. This
is also the easiest way to hold an SEO company accountable for its responsibilities to you.
With your expectations in line, you can begin to really analyze the success or failure of your SEO
efforts. There are several methods for analyzing where you stand, and any of these efforts is valid.
What makes one more useful than another is, first, your needs — you should understand exactly
what you’re trying to achieve and what indicators you’re looking for to know if you’re actually
achieving those goals. And the second reason you might select a specific way of tracking and analyzing
your success is your budget. Some organizations can afford automated tracking tools that
tell them basically everything they need to know about the success or failure of their SEO campaigns.
Other organizations don’t have that kind of budget. Fortunately, there are some methods
of analysis that won’t consume your entire SEO budget.
If all you really need to know is where your web site appears in search rankings, you can use the
search engines and directories that you’re targeting to do a keyword search. That keyword search
should show you where your site is ranking. It won’t show you much more than that, but it does
help you to monitor your position so you know if your efforts are working or not. Just don’t base
your decision on a single search. Search for your keywords daily over a period of time to make
sure your rank on any given day isn’t just an anomaly.
If you’re using this method of analyzing your success, you’ll need a historical view of where your
site appeared in search rankings before you began your SEO efforts. With this measurement, you
can compare your current rankings to see if your listing is climbing or falling. Without historical
data, you should, at the very least, take stock of where your site appears in rankings on the first
day of your SEO campaign. This won’t tell you the average ranking for your site, but it will give
you a good idea of where you should start.
Most web-site hosting companies now provide some form of web statistics program. But this may
be limited to basic measurements like the number of hits, number of unique visitors, search terms
used to find your site, IP address accessing your site, and locations of people accessing your site.
Even this basic information will help you to learn where your visitors are coming from, but you
might want to add to those metrics by expanding your web-stats package.
If you’re looking for a web-stats package that’s more comprehensive, there are a few available online
for free. Most notably, Google Analytics will provide most of the measurements you’ll need, including
keyword tracking for AdWords and for other PPC applications. There are also numerous paid versions
of web statistics software, some hosted online and some that are hosted on your own computer.
Find the package that’s right for your needs, and you’ll have all of the measurements you need to analyze
how successful your SEO efforts are in terms of driving targeted, converting traffic to your site.
When you’re analyzing your web statistics, there are a few principles you should keep in mind.
These principles will help you understand your metrics and how they correlate with your SEO
efforts.
Baseline statistics are the measurements that you collect before you begin to implement changes to
your site, like the changes you’ll make as you’re optimizing your web site. Record statistics such
as the average number of visitors to your site each day. You can later compare this number to statistics
that you collect after your SEO strategies have been implemented, to see the results of your
efforts. If your numbers aren’t improving as you would expect them to, given the changes you’ve
made, then you may not have done something right, or there may be some factor that needs to be
adjusted. Your baseline measurements will help you to see (over time) where you stand.
Referring web sites are those sites from which your site visitors come. If you have PPC ads on Google’s
AdWords network, the referring web site might be one of the search engines those ads are distributed
across. If you’ve written articles and newsletters that have been distributed across the Web, the sites
that host those might be the referring web sites.
Most analytics packages will track your referring sites. They’re then provided in a report that quickly
lets you see where your site visitors are coming from. This information allows you to quickly understand
if your SEO efforts are paying off. If you know that you have several types of campaigns that
should be leading from one site or another, but you don’t find one of those sites listed, you know
those efforts are not working. All that’s left then is to figure out why.
Another useful measurement you’ll find in most web statistics packages is keyword tracking. Most
web statistics packages will track both paid and organic keywords. Which paid keywords are tracked
will depend on the stats package you use, but nearly all of them will track organic keywords.
The value of organic keyword tracking is that you can learn how your site is being discovered. The
words and phrases that visitors use to find you gives you a good look into the way they think of
your business. For example, people won’t usually search for “financial services.” It’s more likely
that they’ll search for “money market,” or “savings account,” or even “free checking account.” A
stats package that tracks these words will help you monitor and analyze the keywords that work
for your site, and will help you stay on top of cultural shifts that change the way people think.
There are a few other statistics you may want to track. These stats will help give you a clearer picture
of the traffic to your site, the behaviors of your site visitors, and how those can be correlated
by aspects such as location and technical capabilities. Some of the additional stats that you might
want to track include:
Page views
Unique visitors
Keywords used by search engine
Pages viewed
Location information
Technological capabilities (web browsers, operating systems, and so on)
Knowing how you can track your SEO results will help you to use all the resources available to you
to analyze your results and make changes that can improve your rankings and the accessibility of
your web site so that you can increase your sales conversions and profits.
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