Mitash SEO, e-Commerce, Shopping Cart, Web Design & Development Blog

As a business owner you spent a considerable amount of time and effort on search engine optimising your website. But how do you guarantee whether this investment is really paying off? Are you thoroughly confident that the surge in performance is due to your SEO efforts or evidence of a corollary marketing campaign? While there are several ways to stay competitive by assessing the returns on your SEO spend, I have outlined below 6 key tips that enable you to measure whether the time and money spent on your website’s optimization campaign are working well for you.

1. Track organic results through non-branded keywords
   Ideally, the success of a Search Engine Optimisation program should be measured in relation to organic searches rather than through branded search results. Especially since SEO returns are based on the number of people who reach your website through searches for general and relevant keywords. Hence, your analysis must separate branded and non-branded keywords to evaluate the impact of your natural search strategy.
   Take for instance, if a sports clothes manufacturer, ‘ActivX’ converts a sale through an organic keyword search for ‘lycra tights’, then the sale should be attributed to SEO. However, if the same sale was converted through the keyword, ‘lycra tights ActivX’, then it’s possible that a previous sale or another marketing initiative resulted in this search.
2. Chart search data progress
   Review your natural search data trends on a weekly basis to understand the type of changes online or offline that are positively influencing it. You can do this by correlating updates to your website such as keywords, content addition, architecture and technology changes and SEO best practices, to understand which changes are significantly impacting your search results. It can take around 4 weeks for search engines to index your website updates and a couple more for these changes to translate in traffic behaviour.
   Another important thing to do is to track your branded keyword performance immediately after you launch a marketing campaign to assess whether or not the campaign is working.
3. Onsite conversions
   Traffic and high rankings on search engines are important; however they are not an effective gauge of SEO success. You could be attracting the wrong traffic and not successfully converting the right traffic. What is needed is a smart combination of drawing in the right traffic and succinctly converting it into a lead, sale and profit. Conversion rates will not rise without successful SEO elements like search engine referral rates, rankings, usability and site content, to name a few. While we’d like to focus solely on increasing conversion rates when optimizing a site, we have to lay the foundation that ensures conversion rates increase.
4. Offline conversions
   Businesses that generate sales leads through natural search must track and monitor the leads’ performance on a keyword basis. While the amount of leads generated by each keyword is easy to monitor, it’s difficult to assess the ultimate conversion rate of those keywords.
   A software company can judge a keyword’s true performance by validating its conversion rate. If this company drives natural search traffic to a landing page that involves filling out a form to request a quote. The sales team then follows-up on this request and try to gain the sale over phone or in person. Information on whether or not the sale materialises should be linked back to the original keyword. This data will help in accurately representing the success of your overall natural search campaign as well as your keyword’s performance.
5. Micro analyse keywords
   If you feel certain keywords should perform better than others, then it’s important that you minutely analyse the metrics associated with these keywords and their landing pages. Keep your eyes open for bottlenecks in the click-path and percentage drops in visitors proceeding to the next step, which could be associated with the design or content problems with the page, or irrelevance to the keyword.
6. Increase in-bound links
   Engaging online communities by participating in forums and creating blogs, as well as
   disseminating press releases, are effective means of building inbound links to your site, which can increase your search engine rankings and traffic. Monitoring these inbound links will not help you understand the amount of revenue your natural search strategy is generating. Instead, it will enable you to assess whether you need to adjust your outreach strategy, an important component of good SEO. You can gauge your SEO efforts by tracking the number of links it earns you.

At the end of the day, to ensure your business success, you have to constantly keep measuring and tracking your SEO efforts. It’s a never-say-die attitude that draws in the winner.

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