How to Measure Your SEO Campaign to Accurately Track Success

If you want to know if your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is working, you will need to have an accurate way to measure success. Here are a few things you can do to see if that time was spent wisely.

Picking a subset of your large keyword list is much easier than tracking the entire list. Choose the main keywords that are increasing sales and focus your tracking on them.

To best select your keywords, use the words that are ranking high for traffic and revenue in your PPC campaign. Then you can easily measure success by watching for words that climb or drop in search-engine rankings.

Revenue: One might think that measuring revenue is the easiest way to determine if your SEO is working. But you need to do it right. You can’t just put up the new pages and start tracking money coming in. Revenue is the most important, and most accurate thing to compare, but it has to be done on an ANNUAL basis.

Since different times of the year have highs and lows, when you track annually, you get a better average and can then determine if the overall strategy is working.

It’s a little more difficult to measure traffic. Use your web site’s Administrative Control Panel as the best resource. The charts and graphs on the back-end show monthly traffic, so it should be easy to compare current traffic to last year’s traffic during the same time periods.

Be sure to take into account any special promotions that may have been done during that time that would skew the numbers. And, watch out for people who are pogo sticking!

Pogo-sticking is when a person jumps back and forth between different pages as they search for information. This usually occurs when a search is done, and the search engine results page (SERP) displays. The searcher then selects the result that looks like it will give the best answer and solve the problem. If the answer isn’t on that page the person hits the “back” button, goes back to the SERP and tries again.

This can really skew your numbers because each time the visitor goes back and forth to pages within a web site, the statistical software on your server counts it as a page view. Sometimes it’s good to get a lot of page views, and then again, sometimes it means that the visitor is not finding what they are looking for.

So, the next time you jump for joy when you view your statistics and see that your page is sticky, do a double check. If you have a lot of pages views from a small amount of visitors, you might want to take a look at your site’s design and see if it is as user-friendly as it should be.

When visitors don’t find what they’re looking for in a reasonable time, they just pogo stick back to the SERP and go elsewhere. Unfortunately, you’ve got the page views, but someone else gets the sale!

Optimizing your pages for the search engines will always be important. But your entire web needs to be user friendly to visitors. Customer sales and satisfaction are the only things that matter for a well-managed SEO campaign to make the revenue it deserves.

Evelyn Grazini is a staff writer for the Affiliate Classroom Magazine. Keep up to date and boost your affiliate sales using the latest techniques, including blogging, and Web 2.0 bookmarking. For a free course that explains how Anik Singal (the owner of AC) earned $10,466 in just 60 days using proven marketing principles, go to: AC Free Course.

- Evelyn Grazini

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