Recommendations for Measuring Your Website's Success

Recommended Metrics for Tracking While every business is unique and every website has different metrics, the following list is almost universal. Note that we are only addressing metrics critical to ranking higher for search engines. As a result, more general metrics may not be included.

1. Search Engine Share of Referral Traffic Each month, it is crucial to keep track of the engagement of each traffic source to your site. This includes: * Direct Traffic: Traffic that comes from typing the URL into the address bar without a tracking code, bookmarks, email links, etc. * Referral Traffic: Links from elsewhere on the web or trackable email, advertising & branding campaign links * Search Traffic: Queries sent from search engines big or small Knowing both the percentages and the exact numbers will help you identify weak spots and compare current data over time. For instance, you don’t need to get excited when you see traffic from referral links that are dramatically spiking but aren’t very relevant. On the other hand, if your search engine traffic drops dramatically, you may be in trouble. You should use this data to track your marketing efforts and plan your traffic acquisition efforts.

2. Referral Traffic from Specific Search Engines The top three search engines –Google and the Yahoo-Bing alliance– account for 95% of all search traffic in the US. For many countries outside the US (with notable exceptions including Russia and China), 80% of search traffic comes from Google alone. Tracking the contribution of each search engine to your search traffic is very important for many reasons: Compare Performance vs. Market Share By tracking search engines not just broadly, but country by country, you can definitively see the level of contribution each search engine provides in line with its estimated market share. Remember that demand in industries like technology and internet services will likely come more from Google (due to its younger, tech-savvy audience) than from sectors like cooking, sports, or real estate. Gain Insight into Potential Declines If your search traffic drops dramatically for any reason, knowing the specific contribution of each search engine to that drop will be necessary for diagnosing the problem. If there is an equal drop across all search engines, the problem is almost certainly related to accessibility. If only Google drops while the others remain the same, you have likely incurred a penalty or drop for your SEO efforts directed at a single search engine. Uncover Strategic Value It is highly probable that some of your SEO efforts will yield more positive results in certain search engines than others. For example, we often find that while numerous sitelink anchor text links have a more positive impact in Google than others, on-page optimization tactics such as comprehensive keyword placement and targeting benefit Bing & Yahoo! more than Google. If you can identify the tactics that yield success for one search engine, you will better know how to focus your efforts.

3. Traffic from Specific Search Terms or Keyword Phrases The keywords that send traffic are another important piece of your statistics pie. You will want to keep tracking the sources that identify new trends in keyword demand, measure the performance of your keyword terms, and find terms that yield significant traffic that you have the ability to optimize. You may also want to track referral numbers for terms outside of the “top” terms/phrases – these are important and valuable to your company. If the trend line is pointing in the wrong direction, you will know that your efforts need to be adjusted in the right direction. All search traffic across the globe has been steadily increasing for the past 15 years, so losing any portion of referrals is troublesome – review seasonality (keywords that are only popular during certain times of the week/month/year) and rankings (that you have dropped or that have fallen in search volume).

4. Conversion Rate by Search Query Term/Phrase When it comes to what matters most to your business, some metrics become important like conversion. For example, 5.80% of visitors who came via the query “SEO Tools” became members during their visit. This is a higher conversion rate than thousands of keywords used to find our site. Now we can do two things with this information. 1. We can check our rankings and see that we are only at position 4 for “SEO Tools.” Surely we can work to improve this position to get more conversions. 2. Because our statistics tell us which page these visitors came from, we can focus efforts on that page to improve the visitor experience. The true value of this simple tracking process comes from the fact that it is “child’s play” – consistently seeing the keywords that send converting visitors and increasing the importance given to both ranking and the development of the landing page that visitors reach. While tracking the conversion rate from keyword phrases is certainly important, it is not the whole story. Dig deeper and uncover much more interesting and actionable data regarding how and where conversion begins and ends on your site.

5. Number of Pages Receiving at Least One Visit from Search Engines Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is a necessary metric for observing overall SEO performance. With this number, we can gain perspective relative to indexing – the number of pages our site holds in the search engines’ indexes. For large websites (50,000+ pages), indexing all pages is necessary for traffic acquisition, and this metric provides trackable numbers that are an indicator of success or failure. If you work on issues such as site architecture, link acquisition, XML sitemaps, content originality, meta data, etc., the trend line will rise, with many more pages finding their place in the search engines’ results and becoming visible. Pages that receive search traffic are likely the best long-term metric. While other statistical data is of great importance, the ones mentioned above are universally accepted for you to get the most out of your SEO campaigns.