You won’t really know if your search engine optimization campaign (or your SEO company) is successful or not unless you set goals and measure your website performance against those goals. This article will show you the proper way to do your metrics.

Set your goals

Don’t simply state that your goal is to have as much visitors as possible. Set your goals SMART – goals that are specific (focused on narrow issues), measurable (assign a number), achievable (you have the proper resources to accomplish the goal), realistic (the goal is something you can actually accomplish) and time-bound (give a deadline to the goal – be it a week, a month, or a year).

Setting your goals is important because this is the yardstick with which you will measure your progress. During your campaign, you will often look back to your goals to see if progress has been really made. If your progress has been a bit wayward during the last couple of checks, either your campaign might need modification, or your goals were not realistic nor achievable in the first place.

Get the proper tools

A craftsman knows his tools, and so should you. There are many free and paid packages out there that can help you measure your progress against your goals. Most of these tools focus on metrics – they measure your site traffic, conversion rates, and provide other neat and useful metrics like bounce rate, “stickiness” and demography.

One of the most powerful and free tools you can use is Google Analytics. Installation is as simple as signing up for an account, verifying that you own the website you’re using the analytics for, and inserting a snippet of javascript. Discussing all the ins and outs of Google Analytics will take a whole article (or three) but suffice to say, it is tool you must get in order to perform effective metric analysis.

Do A-B testing

A-B testing is simply testing out two different versions of layout or keywords against each other, and seeing how well they perform. Inevitably, one version or the other will be perform much better in your choice of metrics. This type of testing is most useful when convincing someone who is higher than you in the command structure, but whose ideas you think aren’t that good. After all, numbers don’t lie.

For example, keyword location and placement are a good candidate for A-B testing. Keywords can be located on different portions of your content page, and the keyword link that brings the most traffic to your product pages is the winner. Some newspaper sites will even serve 50% of the pages with a different headline and see which headline will attract the most people to read the rest of the article; the winning headline will be the headline to be permanently used.

Have patience (lots of it)

Many search engine optimization companies will tell little white lies and say that their campaigns will allow you to reach more than a 5,000%  increase in your traffic. What they’re not saying is that these results are obtained during the first few days of a campaign. Ask them for an average over 30 days and their stats will paint a different picture.

For your metrics to be meaningful, they have to be viewed within the context of a period of time. Don’t jump into conclusions just a few days into your campaigns. Good luck in your search engine optimization campaign!

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Tags: a-b testing, bouce rate, Google Analytics, measuring seo, split tests

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 10:09 am and is filed under SEO Analysis for Results. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.