How To Measure Your Seo Campaign Success

By Author: Mel Joelle
Total Articles: 4328
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It's no secret. The main objective of all SEO Campaigns is high organic search rankings. The higher you rise on those top 3 pages, the more successful you become. Most SEO Professionals measure success with rankings. We follow a bit of a different route here at Optimum7.

- Rankings: Yes, rankings are very important. They're the reason we do SEO. They're one of the most important factors of SEO. However, Rankings cannot justify the success of an SEO campaign alone.

- Backlinks: Sometimes the industry or the keyword might be highly competitive with millions of competing pages for a single term. Thus, it will take a longer time to achieve visible results in terms of organic search results. How then can we know if we are making progress? In those cases, it's always good to monitor the number of Backlinks. This number alone will say a lot about how a campaign is being carried out. Backlinks are the backbone of SEO so you must make sure that you have a positive velocity increase in the number of Backlinks. Backlink velocity is simply the rate of change or growth of the number of Backlinks. To compete effectively ...
... for high rankings, you must achieve a Backlink Velocity that is greater than those of your competition.

- Conversions: SEO is defined as Search Engine Optimization. We at Optimum7 define it as Seek Every Option. We look at all combinations and possibilities of creating conversions and revenue for our clients. Unfortunately, rankings alone do not justify the bottom line of a company or an owner. We make sure that they're covered. Once implemented, make sure that your SEO Campaign creates results and conversions. Without conversions, all the rankings in the world do not mean much. Once you get the conversions, analyze, test and optimize for higher conversions.

- Average Time on Site: One of our favorite stats on Analytics. We love it and smile when we see high average time on site and we frown when it's down. It makes a difference and it's one of the few stats that let you know you are on the right track even if you still do not have organic ranks, or the conversions. Again, make sure that you identify which pages have very low average time on site. Keep working on making those pages better, more user friendly, and interactive. Anything below 60 seconds would be a flag for us here. We love any stats over 2.5 minutes.

- Bounce Rate: Our least favorite stat on analytics. Of course, the lower this number is, the more we like it. It's so tough to keep it low though. Bounce Rate is recorded as a user coming to your site and leaving right away without navigating on the page. It's a flag about that page. It's either not performing well or it's just a passage to another link. Bounce rate tells us a lot about a specific page, content, and how users interact with that content. Any bounce rate above 55% is a bad number for us. This also depends on the industry and the online content. Along with Average Time on Site they make an interesting couple. Here's my basic analysis table.

1. Average Time on Site is high and Bounce Rate is low.

I love it, my favorite combination. It means that the users are interacting well with the content on the page.

2. Average Time on Site is high and Bounce Rate is high.

I like this. Even if the Bounce Rate is high, it means that the users who choose to stay are interacting with the site and they like what they see.

3. Average Time on Site is low and Bounce Rate is high.

The site or the page is not performing; Needs major edits to make it more appealing to the user or the content is not targeted to the traffic. You see this combination a lot in under-performing Adwords PPC Accounts.

Most important of course is revenue. How much revenue are you generating? How many cents are you spending in marketing to generate a dollar of revenue? If you cannot calculate this after 6 months of SEO, you need to re-consider your strategy. In the meantime, please analyze the stats above or give us a call and we will do that for you.
Click here to read the rest of SEO Campaign Success. If you enjoyed this article, you also might like our other stories about Search Engine Optimization.