Although quantifying deliverables and measuring progress are important for external reporting purposes, it is just as important for SEO practitioners to measure the efficacy of their own efforts to make timely adjustments as necessary. As you will see in this chapter, numerous tools are available to aid in this process.
At the beginning of any SEO project it is wise to establish baseline data points for the website. This includes the following:
Quantifying organic search traffic by search engine and keyword
Quantifying a baseline of the major keywords that are driving traffic by search engine
Quantifying a breakout of what sections are getting the current organic search traffic by search engine and keyword
Quantifying data on conversions broken down by search engine and keyword
Identifying poorly performing pages
Tracking search engine crawler activity on the site
Determining the number of indexed pages
Identifying 404 error pages and external sites linking to these pages, if any
Remember: you cannot methodically improve what you cannot measure.
Defining and mapping the path toward concrete goals are crucial aspects of the SEO process—and over time, some goals may change. Therefore, it is also important to make sure the data you capture helps you understand your progress against these goals.
In the world of web analytics, this is referred to as picking Actionable Key Performance Indicators (or Actionable KPIs). The best data measurements are those that potentially result in an action being taken in response. Think of this as data-driven decision making.
In summary, the basic process usually looks something like this:
Define an SEO campaign and set goals.
What are you going to accomplish, and what is the strategy for accomplishing it? How will you measure progress?
Discuss your strategy.
The marketing and business development teams are your allies here—you want to ensure that your SEO objectives are based on the overall business and site objectives, both long- and short-term.
Establish a baseline.
Now that you are about to start and you have decided how you are going to measure progress, establish a baseline by recording the current stats prior to beginning work. Make sure you don’t get a false baseline due to seasonal factors or some other unusual event.
Proceed with your project.
Implement the new pages, the site changes, the link-building campaign, or whatever you have planned. Put it in place and execute.
Collect data.
Collect the newest data for each metric you decided to focus on. Since this is SEO and SEO can take many months to show results, make sure you wait long enough for your efforts to have an impact. Of course, if you are a student of the process, you can take more frequent measurements so that you can see how things begin to progress over time. For many on-page changes, 60 to 90 days are enough, but for link-building campaigns it may take six months or more to see the full impact. Many factors could influence the length of time you should wait. Here are some of them:
If your site is brand new, it may take longer for your changes to take effect.
If the scope of the change is drastic (such as a complete redesign), the time to see results will probably be longer.
Sites that get crawled at great depth and frequency will probably yield results faster.
Sites seen as authoritative may also show faster results.
Compare the baseline data to the new data.
The new data has little meaning unless it is compared to your baseline. This is the time when you can really assess your progress.
Refine your campaign.
Now that you have compared your old data with your new data, you can make some decisions. Is the campaign a bust? If so, abandon it and move on to the next one. The old business axiom “Fail quickly” applies here. The faster you diagnose a failure and move on to the next thing, the better.
You may also find you are getting mediocre results. Examining the data more closely may give you some ideas as to how you can improve those results. And if you are achieving great results, look for ways to scale the effort and drive even more volume.
You can use a properly structured plan as the business case for an SEO project. The way to do this is to express the target results of an SEO project in terms of financial impact. You could include a variety of metrics in a business case, such as:
Revenue
Lead generation
Margin
Branding value
Reach
Other action triggers (newsletter sign-ups, contact requests, demo requests, free-trial acceptance, viewing a specific piece of content, etc.)
Measuring such things requires that you tie organic search engine visits to the revenue and other conversions that result.