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How to Measure Your SEO Campaign to Accurately Track Success |
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Author: Evelyn G. Article source: http://www.articledeshboard.com/. Used with author's permission.
There is quite a bit of literature that explains how to set up web pages for the best natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, there is very little written on how to measure that success. Here are a few things you can do to see if that time was spent wisely.
When you advertise using a large list of keywords to bring traffic to your site, it's not feasible to track each one. It's much easier to pick a subset of the large list - the main keywords that are increasing sales - and track them.
To best select your keywords, use the words that are ranking high for traffic and revenue in your PPC campaign. Then you can easily measure success by watching for words that climb or drop in search-engine rankings.
Revenue: Revenue is the most important thing to compare because it will give the most accurate results. However, it has to be done on an ANNUAL basis to determine exactly what part of your SEO campaign is working.
Since different times of the year have highs and lows, when you track annually, you get a better average and can then determine if the overall strategy is working.
It's a little more difficult to measure traffic. Use your web site's Administrative Control Panel as the best resource. The charts and graphs on the back-end show monthly traffic, so it should be easy to compare current traffic to last year's traffic during the same time periods.
Be sure to take into account any special promotions that may have been done during that time that would skew the numbers. And, watch out for people who are pogo sticking!
When people jump back and forth between different pages as they search for information it's called Pogo-sticking. This usually occurs when a search is done, and the search engine results page (SERP) displays. The searcher then selects the result that looks like it will give the best answer and solve the problem. If the answer isn't on that page the person hits the "back" button, goes back to the SERP and tries again.
This can really skew your numbers because each time the visitor goes back and forth to pages within a web site, the statistical software on your server counts it as a page view. Sometimes it's good to get a lot of page views, and then again, sometimes it means that the visitor is not finding what they are looking for.
So, the next time you jump for joy when you view your statistics and see that your page is sticky, do a double check. If you have a lot of pages views from a small amount of visitors, you might want to take a look at your site's design and see if it is as user-friendly as it should be.
When visitors don't find what they're looking for in a reasonable time, they just pogo stick back to the SERP and go elsewhere. Unfortunately, you've got the page views, but someone else gets the sale!
Optimizing your pages for the search engines will always be important. But your entire web needs to be user friendly to visitors. Customer sales and satisfaction are the only things that matter for a well-managed SEO campaign to make the revenue it deserves.
Evelyn Grazini is a staff writer for the Affiliate Classroom Magazine. Keep up to date and boost your affiliate sales using the latest techniques, including blogging, and Web 2.0 bookmarking. For a free course that explains how Anik Singal (the owner of AC) earned $10,466 in just 60 days using proven marketing principles, go to: AC Free Course.
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