How Your Search Data Can Make You Look Like a Star - Going Beyond Ranking - Other Success Metrics

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My article titled Six Ways to Measure SEO Success discusses some specific metrics that SEOs use to track website positioning and gauge the success of their optimization efforts. Rather than repeat the metrics I listed in this article, I’ll explain some examples of how you can communicate them to upper management or a not-so-web-savvy client. The goal here, of course, is to make you look like a star. If your SEO has done his or her job, this shouldn’t be too difficult. Here are some quick statistics that look great in a slide presentation or a quick one-page progress report.

1. The number of pages indexed by Google has increased by 35% in the past three months.
   
   

   It’s easy to see how many pages from your website are included in Google’s index. Just use the “site” command in the search field. The syntax would look like this: site:yoursite.com or site:www.yoursite.com. These are called “inclusion” numbers and it is important that your SEO agency or consultant track these numbers at the start of the campaign so that when the time comes to present results to your manager, you are armed with some concrete success metrics. Here’s an example of how simple it is to present this as a measurable example of SEO success.
   
   Pages included in Google for Website.com:
   April ’05 – 400
   May ’05 – 560
   June ’05 – 710
   
   This type of data looks delightful in a line graph with a simple one-line summary that would read something like this, “The total number of pages from website.com indexed in Google increased 77.5% from April to June 2005.” This is a fairly clear indicator of success for most people. You might take it a step further and determine what percentage of the site is actually indexed (e.g., 40% of the pages are indexed and our long term goal is to get 99.9% of pages in Google).

2. The number of #1 rankings has increased by 15% and the number of top 10 positions has increased by 30% in Yahoo, MSN and Google.
   
   

   It is an industry best practice to track a website’s positioning when performing SEO on that site. However, SEO reports can look quite daunting when there are hundreds of keywords included across many different search engines. An easy way to boil it down to the bottom line is to provide your manager with a total amount of #1 positions and top 10 positions now, compared to when SEO began. This is easy to translate into percentages and provides another quick snapshot of whether or not your SEO is working.

3. The number of total visitors has doubled since SEO was implemented.
   
   

   Traffic gained from increased search engine ranking is what makes it all worthwhile. You may see your traffic begin to increase before you see your ranking increase. This is because your website is probably showing up for keywords that you’re not directly targeting. Monthly traffic tracking is essential when trying to demonstrate the success of SEO. This an easy metric to obtain, translates well into a graph and is sure to make your manager happy, particularly if your website earns revenue from ad sales.

Next: It's Not Just About the Numbers >>
 

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