Six Ways to Measure SEO Success - 6. Establish your site's conversion rate
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Last but not least, establishing the conversion rate for your website is the highlight of your entire report and often the key metric needed to ensure that your SEO campaign is adequately funded. Establishing your overall site conversion rate is fairly simple. E-commerce sites can simply look at actual sales numbers divided by unique visitors to get their baseline conversion rate. Sites that don't sell anything, but have online registration forms, contact forms or other forms that collect visitor data would divide the number of registrants by unique visitors to get this number.
Understanding your conversion rate for SEO is not as simple as obtaining your overall site conversion rate. You need to extract the number of organic search visitors from visitors who got to the site via other sources, and somehow tie these visitors to actual sales or registrations. There are tracking tools on the market today that let you do this, but it is often an added feature and it's not cheap. ClickTracks is one such tool worth looking into. The tool enables you to view conversion for SEO and PPC keywords in a visual environment perfect for showing off to the boss. It gets this information from your site's log files.
If you don't have a fancy analytics tool like ClickTracks, you can still make some inferences about the impact of organic search traffic based on the data you do have. For example, if you can show that search engine traffic is gradually increasing from month to month and sales are also gradually increasing, then it is natural to assume that increase organic search referrals translates to increased sales. Be careful with generalizations like this, and be sure to track other marketing events that may have also contributed to sales.
You can set up a basic two-page report template that includes these six metrics (or five if you'd prefer to leave out concrete conversion tracking). Two pages of top-level statistics are more than enough to demonstrate success and provide you with the historical data you need to build a solid quarterly or year-end report that will help you secure your SEO budget in the months or years to come.
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