Measuring SEO Performance
SEO is a mixture of art and science. But just like other marketing channels, it’s accountable, and its performance can be measured. By regularly monitoring and measuring your site’s SEO performance will help you manage your SEO campaign more effectively.
When measuring your site’s SEO performance, you need to consider what really matters. For example, if you have an eCommerce site, you’d want to measure your revenue based on organic search referral. That’s what really matters and not the indexation or the number of links that your site receives. The actual success measure is truly “how much did you sell on your website?”
SEO Data
You can go and evaluate your analytics every day. But you also need to monitor your site’s monthly analysis to measure your SEO strategy as a whole. Some marketers would balk at the monthly data. They worry that they might miss developing trends. However, measuring your SEO programs weekly is like chasing your own tail.
Always remember that SEO data can be volatile. A change in one day may still even out the next day. You can keep an eye on your daily and weekly SEO data, but you should also consider looking into the bigger picture of your SEO.
Diagnostic data
As part of your effort to measure your site’s SEO performance, you also need to look into the diagnostic information of your SEO. Collecting your diagnostic data will help you analyze the trends in your industry.
When you have such type of data, you’d know what to do the next time your analytics would show a drop in your SEO performance.
To gather diagnostic data, you can track monthly indexation levels in Google, Yahoo and Bing. You should also consider tracking indexation of major landing page types. Doing it this way would help you determine whether or not a particular area suffered losses.
Another thing to look into is your backlink. That is, the quality and quantity of the links from others site can play a major role in your SEO performance. Fluctuations in those numbers can affect visits and revenues.
It’s also vital to download reports provided by your Google Webmasters Tools. Pay close attention to Search Queries by Top Pages and Top Queries.
Then, you should consider the number of visits and overall revenue. The combination of all these data will give you the ability to analyse your site’s SEO performance. Now, when you see a sudden drop in the performance, you can quickly identify the stages that were affected and create a plan to resolve the issue.
