Quantifying the success of an SEO campaign is problematic because there are a variety of metrics that can be used to measure progress. The best way to measure a campaign is to have clear aims and objectives at the start. Ask yourself the question…”what do I want to achieve from this?” The reason you should ask this question is that not all SEO campaigns will have exactly the same objectives.
I think one point worth mentioning is that SEO is a form of marketing and as such, the relative success of the SEO campaign needs to be examined in respect of other variables that could effect the performance of a website such as pricing, product range, usability, economic factors, seasonality, etc….Anyone one of these factors could adversely effect the perceived performance of an SEO campaign. That is, of course, if you measure success in terms of raw metrics such as revenue, CPA/CPS or ROI.
ROI is not an unfair metric to use a barometer for an SEO campaign, on the contrary it will be the metric that *most* clients will want to use. This is perfectly acceptable, but it should not be the ONLY measurement. It is better to take a holistic approach, here is a list of factors on which you can potentially measure success rates..
Indexing
Improving the indexing of a site is important because without pages being indexed, your content has zero chance of being displayed in the SERPS. There maybe a simple technical reason why sites content isn’t being indexed properly, but fixing it could mean a whole load more content being counted by the search engines. This in turn could have consequential benefits such as increasing traffic.
Pagination
Google likes big sites, rather Google likes authoritative sites, eBay, Amazon, BBC etc. Authoritative sites like this tend to have thousands of pages indexed, but that isn’t why they are authoritative per se. Churning out hundreds of pages with poor quality or irrelevant content is unlikely to make a great deal of difference to your SEO efforts. In fact, do it too quickly you can actually harm your rankings. But adding quality, well written content that is likely to get social media bookmarked or linked back to will aid your rankings effort. It will allow you to gain natural links, prossibly from other relevant websites.
Backlinks
As with the number of pages indexed, authoritative sites tend to have a high number of quality backlinks. However it would not be acceptable to go to a client and state “we have increased the number of backlinks to X”. However link building is a vital part of building a successful campaign. Links can be acquired in vast quantities, however unless they are relevant / quality or have a clear purpose (such as helping with indexing) they are likely to have little impact.
Traffic
Delivering more organic traffic to the site is the key element to an SEO campaign as it is a necessity before other metrics can be delivered such as increased revenue and ROI. However, the traffic needs to be relevant to the site. Relevance does not always need to be measured in terms of conversions however, some SEO campaigns may be based around brand awareness / raising the profile of a particular brand. This could even done via extensive social networking efforts. In this instance SEO wanders into the realms of online promotion rather than being search engine specific…the lines are becoming increasingly blurred.
Rankings / Keywords
Too many SEO campaigns focus solely on ranking for specific keywords. This tactic can work to an extent for specific niche’s where the product range is narrow and the relevant keyphrase lexicon is limited. One issue that should be addressed here is what are the keywords that are chosen? Are they good converting keywords, will they deliver a decent amount of traffic. Will the keyphrases people search for change over time. We have seen people evolve their searching habits from looking for “search engine promotion” as opposed to “search engine optimisation”. If your entire campaign is focused on five specific words, and five words only, are you risking not being future proof or limiting the impact you can have online? Rankings are important and should not be discarded – who wouldn’t want to be number one for “car insurance” for example. But they should be looked at in the round along with the other aforementioned metrics and not focussed on exclusively.
Revenue / ROI
Most companies embarking on SEO will want to increase their own coffers, whether that be by direct sales revenue or in an increase of new business leads. However, their are so many other factors which can impact upon conversion levels. That doesn’t mean the SEO campaign should be completely detracted from revenue levels, assuming that all other factors remain fairly constant. If this is so, then revenue and ROI are perfectly legitimate barometers of success. Once again however, it is best to look at revenue in the round with other metrics. What if the conversions all came from a brand term and traffic and rankings had not increased, could the SEO still take credit for greater revenue. Conversely if the new additional revenue came from longer tail traffic gained from new content or from referrals from sites that the SEO had targeted for links, then the success should be attributed.
In conclusion, I would argue that a truly successful, holistic SEO campaign will look at a variety of factors to measure the success level and they will be broadly inline with what the original objectives were.
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