Getting a genuine and realistic sense of return on investment is vital for making the most of your SEO effort.
Identify your key performance indicators
Indicators such as increased traffic, improved Google rankings and greater referrals are all very well, but are they actually justifying the time and money that you spend on your site?
For most commercial web sites, traffic in itself has pretty limited value – it’s paying customers that count. Who cares if more people are visiting your site when nobody’s buying anything? An improved performance in Google search results is irrelevant if you’re attracting the wrong people.
Developing a genuine sense of return on investment
Very few commercial sites are judged wholly on the amount of traffic they receive or their rankings in Google. It’s all very well being in the top 10 for all your keywords, but if you are not making a profit on your site then it is all for nothing.
It is important to determine what you actually want to attract people to your site for. Do you want them to buy something from you? Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to register so you can send them sales and marketing information? Or are you just trying to get them to return on a regular basis?
Determining the goals of your site is the first step in being able to measure the genuine benefit of your search engine optimisation. If you know what you want your visitors to do on your site, then you can measure over time how many more people are doing this because of your efforts with search engines. These goals, or key performance indicators, are the bottom line when making a judgement on the value of any search engine optimisation.
If you are running an e-commerce site then you are in a position to put a direct financial metric on the return on investment that you are getting. However, key performance indicators are not necessarily financial. They can – and should – include a range of factors that include brand awareness, customer loyalty and lead generation.
Lies damned lies…
Although key performance indicators should underpin any search engine optimisation project, reliable web statistics are an important diagnostic tool.
Web statistics can be used to justify pretty much anything. If you want to dig beneath the headlines of your web statistics and get a genuine picture of how your site is performing then there are a number of factors that you will have to bear in mind.
Ignore the noise
Search engine spiders, people from your own company, your own web site developers – these are the most regular visitors to your site and they can skew your website results, particularly for lower-traffic sites. Make sure that any web statistics package allows you to filter these visitors out of the data from the very start.
Don’t be fooled by seasonal trends
There are natural seasonal peaks in any website traffic. Any SEO consultant who claims success for your site by demonstrating growth over the fourth quarter of the year ought to be shown the door. The “back to school” phenomenon is very much a part of internet traffic – there are natural annual peaks traffic in September and January.
If you want to get an idea of the genuine growth of your site, then you should be comparing traffic trends year-on-year. This relies on consistent measurement so that you are measuring the same thing thoughout the year.
What’s the bounce rate?
You want visitors who are interested in the whole of your site, rather than people who land on a single page, think better of it and leave. The bounce rate is the number of people who leave your site after only looking at one page. If your search engine referral traffic has a high bounce rate then you may well be targeting the wrong traffic.
Do people ever come back?
Returning visitors implies that your site is useful to somebody – you can learn a lot by analysing which parts of your site these regular visitors actually look at. Do they ever order anything? Do they always look at the same things? How regularly do they visit?
Getting a good grasp of these issues can help you to develop content that encourages more repeat visitors.
Are we paying twice?
Pay per click campaigns can end up making you pay extra for traffic that might have found its way to your site anyway. Pay per click is a useful way of pulling in extra traffic, but if you have already invested in natural search then there is little value
Get an appropriate statistics package
A good statistics package is critical for measuring the effectiveness of SEO, but be wary of overspending. A simple solution such as Google Analytics is perfectly adequate for most small to medium sized sites. More generous solutions for the enterprise can provide you with all the statistics you would ever need, but these are rarely justified on the grounds of cost.