Just as in all cases, in SEO too, if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. Ideally, in Search Engine Optimization or SEO measurement is the most critical part of its success. Keyword rankings are the most significant measure of SEO. In most of the cases, it is found that more keywords ranking higher results in more traffic.
However, reporting only on the basis of keywords will devalue the role of the marketer. It will also not let you know why SEO in particular is important to any organization. In order to ensure the success of your SEO campaigns, you will need to look beyond keyword rankings. This will let you as well as your marketing team to know and showcase different things such as:
- What really matters
- How organic search can bring more traffic and
- How more traffic can bring in more revenue and profit to any business.
Thankfully, there are some of the best SEO analytics tools available out there for free that will allow you to measure SEO results, ROI and success more easily. All it matters is how well you know about the tools as well as the tactics to use it in order to measure your SEO precisely.
Viewing only organic search traffic
The first thing is to ensure that you focus only on organic search traffic. Well, this may seem very obvious to you but this is something that many companies fail to understand. As a result, they experience a significant decline in the overall website traffic from New York City and all over. However, this decline is not due to a drop in organic search traffic.
You can know the actual reason if you dig a little deeper into the matter. It is then you will see that actually the organic traffic is quite high but the other traffic sources are much lower. This results in the overall traffic decline.
There is a simple process to follow to look into then organic traffic to your site and measure your SEO efforts and performance. You have to click on:
- Acquisition
- All Traffic and
- Channels in that order.
This will help you to see all the traffic sources segmented by each channel. This detailed report will include only the metrics of organic search traffic. Using this report, you will be able to determine useful things such as:
- The keywords that are driving mots traffic from different sources
- The top landing pages for the organic search traffic
- The specific search engines that are sending the most traffic and
- The top exit pages and lots of other metrics.
All these facts and figures will help you immensely in your SEO reporting because,
Measure the quality
Simply getting a high number of organic traffic to your site does not necessarily mean that your SEO efforts is highly successful and it is performing well to provide you high ROI. Ideally, you will need to measure the quality of SEO traffic that is generated by your site. If it is not high quality then it will not do any good for your business or for your site.
Yes, quality is a subjective term and you may think that it is not possible to measure it. This however, need not be true because there are lots of ways in which you can not only measure the search but also the quality of the traffic source.
The most common and highly useful analytics report that you can use to measure the quality along with the improvement or decline of search traffic is the Assisted Conversions report. You can get to this through this path:
- Conversions
- Multi-Channel Funnels
- Assisted Conversions.
This report when active will let you compare the quality of the traffic of last month to the previous period if only the date range is set properly. This will provide you with a month-to-month comparison of conversion directly from the search. It will also provide you with a lot of insights even if there are multiple visits to a site. All these analytics and reports will show those conversions wherein the search results played a significant role.
The inference that you deduce from this report is pretty simple. If there is a decline noticed in the conversions from the search but the overall search traffic is found to be steady, then it can be deduced easily that the traffic coming from other sources or searches is not qualified and is not of very high quality.
On the other hand, if you see that there is an improvement in traffic and conversions from the search traffic after using a more refined set of keywords, you can conclude that the SEO traffic quality is surely improving.
Assign dollar values
It is important that you assign dollar values to the organic traffic. This is the more traditional way to understand the value of SEO for your business and whether or not it is actually bringing any improvements in the search traffic or in the visibility and conversions.
In order to assign a total dollar value to the organic traffic of your site, compare the cost of the keywords if you purchased it from a Google AdWords campaign. You must find the keyword search phrases and queries for your site and to know the data volume and trends.
The process to follow includes:
- Entering the top keywords from the Google Analytics Queries report
- Clicking on “Get search volume” and
- Then on “Keyword Ideas” on the next screen.
You will get a suggested bid amount for each keyword. This amount is just an estimate of what the advertisers are presently paying for each click on each keyword listed.
List all these keywords that are driving traffic along with the amount for click-throughs against each specific keyword. Also note the cost-per-click estimated and the sum of this estimated cost multiplied by the amount of each clicks in the final column. This is how you will get the total organic traffic value for each keyword.
Following all these tactics you will be able to measure and improve your SEO results.
