A great SEO campaign is not only about increasing the visibility and exposure of a brand or a website, but also about lowering the bounce rate, improving customer engagement, and maximizing customer retention.
At this point in the game, it’s well into 2015, and most savvy people that work online understands the fundamentals of SEO. It involves selecting relevant keywords for a campaign, then placing them strategically in the content throughout your site. The toughest part is creating content that inspires and creates links to your site to build credibility then sharing within your community of readers and potential clients. While these form the essentials of SEO, these activities don’t necessarily guarantee success in the SERP’s. This is why you need to utilize the proper metrics in order to measure the success of your SEO efforts.
Metrics – The Most Important Part of SEO Success
So you’ve executed an SEO strategy, and the outcome seems to be beneficial for the business, what’s next? How do you measure this improvement, and how do you benchmark your next SEO strategy?
This is where the metrics come in. You need to have certain measures to evaluate your SEO performance. And there is no better indicator of your SEO success than your statistics! There are two ways to do this:
- How many new visitors have you been able to attract after your SEO implementation? And how many of these are actually your target customers? It’s also time for you to look at the bounce rate. How many visitors ended up spending less than ten seconds on your website? If your SEO strategy attracts thousands of customers, but doesn’t appear to engage them in any way (the ten second rule), your SEO campaign requires major reforms to streamline performance against SEO objectives.
- What is the return on your investment in SEO? That’s a tough question, but there are ways to answer that sort of generic question. How much do you spend (to get your website optimized or to place paid advertisements across different channels) against every conversion? Is your cost of acquiring new customers justified? Just remember a ton of traffic doesn’t mean a ton of conversions. If your costs are too high and your revenue structure doesn’t justify the expense then you need to revise your SEO strategy for greater gains.
We believe numbers and a way to manage your results (accountability) are one of the key aspects of any successful SEO campaign. You can invest any amount of business resources and implement any kind of SEO strategy, but without the numbers, there can be no concrete analysis of the effectiveness of your SEO strategy or tactics.
Food For Thought
SEO is NOT complicated, but there does need to be a firm understanding of what you’re doing and why, no doubt about it. There are many businesses that don’t invest in SEO (for whatever reason). Needless to say, 9 out of 10 businesses don’t because they have no clue what they’re doing or what they want to accomplish.
Metrics are necessary
At the end of the day metrics are necessary for any business that wants to move forward. Understanding metrics in regards to understanding your SEO investment and the possibilities associated with it is a critical aspect of your ongoing SEO strategy. Metrics help you evaluate and adapt in order to ensure your efforts aren’t wasted.
If you’re hoping to boost your business performance through SEO, you need the numbers to assess how well you’ve achieved your objectives! The metrics go a long way in assisting continuous improvements, defining the next plan of action and streamlining unproductive SEO campaigns.
