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If you want to know if your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is working, you will need to have an accurate way to measure success. Here are a few things you can do to see if that time was spent wisely.
If you are using a large number of keywords to bring traffic to your site, it’s definitely not feasible to track each one. For this reason, you should pick a subset of the large list – the main keywords that are increasing sales – and track them.
Use the words that currently rank high for traffic and revenue in your PPC campaign. Then 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. Your web site’s Administrative Control Panel is the best resource. The graphs and charts on the back-end show monthly traffic, making it easy to compare current traffic to last year 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!
Pogo-sticking is when a person jumps back and forth between different pages as they search for information. 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.
Unfortunately, when people pogo-stick you get the page views, but someone else might get the sale. Visitors who don’t find what they’re looking for in a reasonable time just pogo stick back to the SERP and go elsewhere.
It will always be important to optimize your pages for the search engines, and make sure your site is friendly to all visitors. In the end, a well-managed SEO campaign will remember the bottom line – customer sales and satisfaction are the only things that matter.
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.
- Evelyn Grazini