How to Measure SEO Success

It’s the start of a New Year and like most of us, senior marketing and advertising executives are looking over the past year’s search engine marketing efforts, trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Now PPC (pay-per-click) is a little bit easier to measure. If you’ve implemented any type of conversion tracking, you can see not only the impressions and clicks/visitors that came to your site but also the cost per conversion and additional revenue streams your advertising dollars brought you.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a little bit harder to measure; however, don’t let that discourage you from trying, it can be done. “SEO’s success metrics…are actually quite cut-and-dry.” explains Todd Friesen at OMMA (Magazine of Online Media, Marketing and Advertising) in his article, How to Measure SEO Success. He recommends comparing data year-over-year because it averages out the effects of seasonality and takes into account that SEO campaigns progress in phases.

When it comes to revenue-producing SEO (as oppose to brand building SEO), Todd recommends using these five key metrics to define the success of an SEO campaign: rankings, traffic, revenue, return on investment (ROI), and exposure. Rankings covers where your site is placing in the search engines for words that are important to your business. Traffic measures the number of visitors coming to your site through these rankings. Revenue is the amount of money you’ve made from the utilization of SEO. Return on investment (ROI) measure your net profit after you remove the costs in implementing the SEO campaign. Exposure is the overall effect the SEO campaign has on your ability to reach your type of customers on the internet.

What kind of success can you expect from your SEO campaign?

Using the metric of rankings, over a year’s time, Ten Golden Rules was able to increase a yacht broker’s Top 10 rankings by more than 515%. Another client, a Chicago personal injury attorney, had their Top 10 search engine rankings by more than 260%. All these different SEO metrics are interconnected with each other. By increasing rankings, Ten Golden Rules was also able to increase traffic, revenue, and exposure at a reasonable ROI for these clients.

While we’d love to brag some more about our clients’ SEO successes, due to client confidentiality, we can’t post that information on the internet. However if you’re interested in hearing more about implementing a successful SEO campaign and how to measure those results, please contact Ten Golden Rules at 561-620-9121 or email seosuccess@tengoldenrules.com.