Web Analytics and Optimization Blog

The KPIs of SEO

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Many companies are taking a much more serious look at Search Engine Optimization as an effective growth technique for their websites. But after investing in an SEO exercise, how will you determine if your efforts paid off? SEO engagements with top firms can be very pricey so when someone finally asks, “Hey - that Google thing we did back last month…how did that work out?” wouldn’t you love to be ready with a detailed 1-page report? Of course you would!

My SEO expert colleague Nima Asar Haghighi (check out his blog) and I have been trying to determine what are the Key Performance Indicators for measuring Search Engine Optimization and here’s what we’ve come up with:

Percentage Change in Visits/Visitors from Organic Search

Although probably the most obvious indicator, this metric is by far the most important. After all, if your SEO efforts didn’t permanently end up in an increase in the number of visits or unique visitors (depending on your analytics tool’s abilities) then those efforts weren’t worth all that much!

Percentage Change in Number of Organic Search Keywords

By measuring the percentage increase in the total number of organic search keywords to your website, your essentially evaluating if your SEO efforts resulted in search engines assigning a broader set of keywords to your content. The benefit of this? A broader set of keywords means your visitors have to be less precise when trying to find your site and what you offer.

This is actually a good time to re-examine the concept of the long tail again for those who are unfamiliar as this metric and ones to follow measure the effectiveness of lengthening the long tail.

The long tail in our case, measures those many, many, many organic search keywords that drive a fairly low number of visits or unique visitors to your site. This is a pattern that happens naturally as for most sites, the keywords that really drive traffic to your site are branded, outside of those though there are a number that drive traffic with many variations. Consider the article I have on installing Google Analytics. Google and Yahoo both drive a fair number of visits to this page, but take a look at the many subtleties in terms of the keywords visitors use to access the same content:

• google analytics install
• google analytics installation
• installing google analytics
• google analytics cross domain
• google analytics multiple domains
• and so on and so on…

Each of those keywords above didn’t drive much traffic, but they make up that long tail which is vitally important! Why? Because SEO isn’t about optimizing for the keywords visitors already identify with your brand, SEO is about optimizing for keywords that visitors didn’t even know related to your site.

Now that we’ve all got why optimizing the long tail is important, let’s move on!

Percentage Change in the Number of Entry Pages

Similar to an increase in the number of organic search keywords, with an increase in the number of entry pages we’re looking at long tail success again.

Specifically with this metric we’re trying to determine, “How effective have we been at opening up our entire site to the world?” Assuming you’ve optimized your site correctly, you should be seeing a significant increase in the number of entry pages as search engines begin including more and more pages into their indexes.

Percentage Change in the Number of Brand Keywords

Similar to both of the above metrics, the objective of this one is to ensure that new keywords you associate with your brand (or just your introductory brand keywords if it’s a new business starting out) are being associated with your site.

When Nike launches a new men’s fitness shoe for example on their site I’m sure (or actually I hope) that they ensure to perform some optimization techniques in hopes that the name of the new shoe for example begins showing when visitors begin search for the product by name.

As Nima would say, you’re measuring “building brand through the long tail”.

Bringing it all together…

Finally bringing it all together, a very simple dashboard report might look something like the table below.

The last note I’ll speak to here is that we’ve done a good job of picking a few metrics that allow us to measure our success in driving traffic to the site organically but what we’re not measuring is what that traffic does!

While Google may be able to drive traffic to your website, the traffic isn’t worth anything to you if they: bounce / never generate leads / never purchase a product / never tell a friend / never [ Insert your conversion event here ].

I’ve chosen to steer clear of mentioning this only because if you’re strictly evaluating SEO, you’re evaluating how your efforts have paid off in driving traffic to your site. After that, it’s the site’s job to give your visitors a reason to stick around which is really a separate topic altogether (optimization!).

In any case, I hope that helps at least some of you with understanding what to measure before heading into a costly SEO implementation. Happy optimizing!

Footnote! Recently read an additional article on KPIs of SEO that you should definitely have a peek at, a few new ones that you can choose to add to your SEO dashboard!

http://www.netconcepts.com/natural-search-kpis/

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