The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had earlier this week with someone working in a finance job. He asked me the question “What do you measure in SEO”. It’s an interesting question.

So what do we measure in SEO?

I think we can classify two different types of measures relevant to SEO:

• Productivity measures: Actioned and Actual
• Meaningful Results: Rankings, Traffic, Conversions and Return on Investment

In this post, I will consider these measures in terms of link-building, but they can also be applied to on-site optimisation.

Productivity measures

It can be helpful to measure how effective a manual link-building campaign has been. One way to do this is to compare the effort put in versus the outputs.

Actioned

These actioned items will be dependent upon what the link-building campaign consists of. These measures could include:

• Number of websites contacted/link directories submitted to/article directories submitted to
• Time spent doing the activity
• Cost of activity

Actual

There should be a positive correlation with the activities actioned. Here are the measures relating to productivity which really matter:

• Number of links acquired
• Quality of links acquired (lots of factors should be taken into account here such as the type of link, on-page location of link, anchor text of link etc.), but the quality could be measured simplistically using a value like mozRank or mozTrust.

The idea is simply that by measuring the effort you have undertaken in trying to acquire links, you can ascertain the value of these activities by measuring the number and quality of links acquired. This can be helpful to understand how effective you have used your resources while link-building. But of course the true value of links gained from a campaign will be demonstrated when analysing the results of a link building campaign…

Results

Rankings

Rankings are worthwhile measuring and some clients will put a great deal of emphasis upon search engine ranking positions. Rankings are an effective way to measure the accountability of targeted SEO campaign as they are not impacted by seasonal changes to the same extent as organic traffic to a website can be. (For example, if you are working on the SEO for a fireworks company, it will be helpful to measure the rankings of the site in order to be able effectively ascertain to what extent the link building and onsite changes are having an impact because the organic site traffic and conversions will fluctuate dramatically around national festivals like Christmas).

While measuring rankings can be useful, the results that search engine ranking scraping tools produce are often riddled with errors. Furthermore, keyword rankings will often fluctuate and are unlikely to remain completely static. Consequently, focusing too heavily on keyword rankings in reporting can be harmful because your client will equate your campaign’s success with keyword rankings. The upshot of this might be that if one of your clients top keywords falls to the second page for a short period of time, they may be on the phone panicking, asking for an explanation!

Traffic: Quality, Quantity and Conversions!

The most important measure for organic optimisation is undoubtedly traffic: the quantity and quality in terms of conversions.

It can be helpful to breakdown traffic by keyword to understand the relationship between ranking and traffic volume. Most importantly however is understanding overall traffic volume to the site and through how many keywords the traffic came. Sometimes the impact of long-tail traffic can be overlooked, but long-tail traffic can convert better than head-tail traffic! As a result its important to ensure that long-tail traffic is reported upon.

If you are working with a client that has a very strong brand, like TomTom or Sony Ericsson, it can be helpful to report on non-brand related organic traffic. A healthy SEO campaign will result in generic, non-brand related organic traffic to increase as your client’s website ranks higher for head-tail and long-tail keywords.

Finally and most importantly is measure is that of conversions. Conversions are perhaps the best measure (when conversions are directly linked to organisational objectives e.g. sales) because conversions take into account the quality of the traffic. If you have a website which sells products and your SEO campaign brings in lots of traffic which simply reads your content and leaves without purchasing, the quality of traffic to your site probably isn’t very high. Conversion measures are the ultimate way to make SEO accountable and understand the return on investment of an SEO campaign. If your SEO campaign results in conversions going up and the returns from these conversions are greater than the investment, your SEO campaign has been successful.

Conclusion

The issue of measurement is of course subjective. I’ve included what I think is worthwhile measuring, but I am interested to learn what you think is important to measure in search engine optimisation?

SEOguy January 21, 2010 Votes: +0	It's been said many times before that success is only success if you can measure it. That's especially true for SEO. report abuse vote down vote up