With search engine optimization and online marketing, many people are only after the golden #1 organic rank on the search engine result pages and this is seen by many as the ultimate success with their campaign. With any SEO campaign, rankings should not be the sole factor of your strategy, but should only be used as an indicator of your progress. SEO is all about bringing in quality traffic that will convert.
If organic ranking positions are not the sole measure of indicating whether you are successful with your campaign, what is? Could it be the number of visitors to your website? It’s all about generating better results on your website. This could be in the form of leads, sales or another type of conversion.
To start with a SEO campaign, start the whole process with your website. If you are generating quality traffic to your site, will it result in a conversion? What can you monitor to see the progress of your website? Find below a couple of tips that can help you with this process.
SEO measurement tips
Conversions: This is the number of leads, sales, phone calls, or direct contacts that comes from your website.
Rate: How many of your visitors convert? You can work this out by calculating over a period of time the number of visitors that came to your website and how many resulted in a conversion.
Bounce rate: This is an important metric that will show you how many visitors came to your website and left right away. For SEO, make sure you always have a bounce rate of below 50%. Anything above 50% clearly shows that your website is not optimized for conversions.
Organic rankings: You can still measure this, but it’s not the only metric to use.
Search traffic: How many visitors gets generated from the search engines? How many from different sources? This can also give you a good indication on your SEO success. You can also check and see how many of the visitors that came from organic results used other terms to find you without using your name, brand, or products in their search criteria.
Alexa: This is not a success measure, but can give you valuable information on how your website rank compared to your competition.
