Measuring SEO performance

One of the biggest challenges you might find is in figuring out whether your SEO campaigns are succeeding or failing. SEO measurement not only involves the analysis of basic metrics like traffic resulting from organic search engines and specific keywords, but it also requires a holistic approach to measuring business outcomes and making adjustments based on data. If you've never paid attention to SEO before, there are some basic things you'llneed to have checked off your list. Before you can do anything, you need to make sure that you have an analytic solution installed.

Something like Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends or Coremetrics will do the job. You'll want to invest some time and resources into making sure that your web analytics tracking is implemented and configured properly and recording data accurately. This means that you'll probably need to go beyond slapping some JavaScript on your pages, and at a minimum, you will need to configure your analytic solution to track goals and business outcomes, but the sky is the limit on what you can track these days. Ensuring a robust and complete implementation will make your data trustworthy enough that you can use it to make confident, evidence-based decisions.

Once you're collecting the data, you will need to define your businessobjectives and the key performance indicators, or KPIs, you'll use to measure them. For example, you might want people to submit a contact form on your website. In that case, you can configure your analytic solution to track that as a conversion action, and you might look at KPIs like the number of conversions that occur and the conversion rate. This is just one example. But remember, you'll have lots of goals for your website, and that means you'llhave lots of KPIs to continually monitor and improve upon.

You'll also want to establish some SEO-specific KPIs that can help youunderstand how your SEO efforts are paying off. Things like organic searchtraffic, or visits to your website from search engines that are not generated bypaid search, but organic listings; your total organic search traffic compared toa previous timeframe, like month-over-month or year-over-year; non-brandedkeyword searches, or searches where your brand or your business name was not part of the search term; and target keyword rankings, or how well you rank for each of your target keywords.

While this last one might not be available in your standard analytics reports,there are plenty of tools out there that can automate the monitoring ofkeyword rankings over time. Anyone working in SEO that's worth their paycheck should be keeping an eye on these metrics at a minimum, but this is really just scratching the surface. While attracting traffic to your website through your SEO program is certainly important, you also need to see what the traffic is actually doing once they get to your site. When you analyze traffic that comes from a certain search engine as a result of a certain keyword search, and lands on a certain landing page, you should also start to look at how that traffic converts on your business goals.

If you're in an ecommerce situation, then you should obviously be looking atthings like revenue, average order values, and other transactional data. But even if you don't sell your products online, you've still got lots of things to track. You can look at leads that come in the form of newsletter subscribers, social followers, event or demonstration sign ups, driving directions to yourbrick-and-mortar store, contact forms, or anything else you can dream up.And these days there are lots of analytic solutions that allow you to trackphone calls back to the source of traffic as well.

Make sure that you're measuring all of these important business goals so thatyou can look at the conversions and conversion rates from the traffic your SEO is generating. Ensuring that you're collecting the right data, reporting on your KPIs in a meaningful way, and analyzing the data to really understand what's happening with your SEO strategy, is a foundation, but just looking at the data doesn't change anything. Measuring and improving your SEO over time is a continuous cycle of measurement, learning, and taking action. You have to use the data to learn what changes you can make to your strategy,and once you've made those changes, you'll start the cycle over again bymeasuring whether or not those changes produced an improvement.

Until you reach perfection, there's always something you can be doing better.And a data-driven measurement plan for your SEO will have you on the path to continuous improvement.

Analyzing the impact of social media

SEO experts in the industry have been testing social shares and how searchengines may be handling these signals in their algorithms to rank pages for quite a while now. And Google has stated what most SEOs now believe. They do use social signals to determine rankings. Let's take a look at a few ways to measure how your content is being shared and identify the most shareable content on your website. Because social sharing has an impact on your rankings, it's important to look at what's worked in the past, so that we can make improvements in the future.

There are lots of tools out there to measure and manage social media these days, but one you should take a look at is called Social Crawlytics. You can use this tool to audit your pages and see how many shares from a variety of social channels are pointing to your site. Social Crawlytics covers eight social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Google+, and Pinterest. To start, you can log in with your Twitter account, and you'll just need to enter a website address in the dashboard screen to initiate the crawling process.

We'll use my own company's website, www.cardinalpath.com, as our example. Depending on how deep your site structure goes, you may need to adjust the Crawl depth from two to three or four. This tool will only crawl HTML content pages, so keep in mind that if you have other types of files on your site, they will be discarded from the report. When you're ready, click Submit and the tool will start crawling and processing the results for your domain. It may take up to 10 minutes for your report to finish.

The completed report will appear in the Reports tab, and you'll find a pagefilled with figures and charts. The Summary tells us how many times your website's pages were shared, up to the depth you specified for the crawl.Here, we can see around 1100 shares of the 148 pages of our website'scontent that was scanned. The Page shares per network bar chart breaks down all of the pages crawled, and shows you which channels were most active. In this case, we can see that Twitter and LinkedIn are very active channels for us, and this kind of information helps us understand where we have a strong presence we can take advantage of, as well as which networks we might want to work on.

Hovering over any of the slices of data will show us the actual content that was shared on that channel. Further down the page, you'll find a table with the results listed by page URL. Here is where you can see the raw number of shares from each channel, along with a count of all shares added up under the Total column. Having this data to look at, as you continue to create and promote content on your pages, can help you determine how useful and shareable your content is. By analyzing what kinds of pages tend to get shared and how effective your promotion strategies are, you'll be able to ensure that you're authoring the right kind of content, and promoting it in a way that will get it out there in the social networks, for both people and search engines to find.