Boost your business by measuring
your SEO activities – 1

A wise saying prevails in the industry that if you can measure it, you can improve it. And that equally applies to search engine optimization, since measurement is critical to your success. One of the most worthwhile aspects of boosting your ecommerce site is to ensure that the bottom-line impact of your search engine optimization curriculum can be measured appropriately.
Conversion measurement is tentatively simple with ecommerce stores – Did the visitor buy any item? Many online sites use vague measures like eBook downloads, newsletter signups or coupon downloads to approximate engagements; however, counting them among conversion types might not be considered as effective business drivers to measure profits in terms of revenue. All you need is to outline your key performance indicators.

Outline your KPIs

You need to precisely understand what your site is seeking to achieve even before you can effectually measure the success of your SEO campaign. Your key performance indicators or KPIs demonstrate the overall success of SEO program. SEO’s goal is to drive higher numbers of qualified visitors to your site to purchase products. To narrow down, KPIs are best measured on the number of visits, orders placed and revenue generated out of purchased products. Apart from visits, orders and revenue, any other data source can only indirectly reciprocate or diagnose rather than indicate performances appropriately.
Importantly, your KPIs should be SMART
Specific – You need to identify the specific areas that demands improvement. If your business is primarily focused on revenue and on a specific product line, you need to measure the exact KPI to achieve a suitable result.
Measurable – Once you have identified the goal, you need to either measure it or closely estimate it.
The goal needs to be measurable, or alternative ways to approximate the data needs to be agreed upon. In addition, the data needs to be available. If you can’t measure organic search revenue, then revenue cannot be a goal for the program.
Assignable – The goal needs an owner who can drive the activities or the team to completion.
Realistic – The goal must have a realistic framework which can aptly define how the search engine works and what all resources are available to achieve it.
Time bound – Specify a date by which the goal needs to be accomplished.

Identify and analyze your website goals

In many cases, realizing a website’s goal is fairly easy and can be jot down into one of two common categories:

• Sales and revenue – online purchases, ticket bookings, etc.
• Enquiries and leads – contact form completions, phone calls, replying to emails, etc.

However, some of the websites may have ambiguity and it may not be easy to pin down any specific website goals. But you need to know what you want from your visitors, otherwise how will you measure success or failure of SEO campaigns? And essentially, how will you measure or estimate ROI?
It is crucial to evaluate your website and establish precisely what you want customers to do and why. If you want your customers to view specific pages or stay in your website for a certain amount of time, that can definitely be measured or tracked, but the question is – Does that define success for you? What value it adds to your business? If you have proper answer to these categories of questions with justifications that is meaningful, you can translate your website goals into your business goals and move ahead with tracking goals and efficiently measuring SEO success.

Brand or Non-Brand search queries – which one serves SEO campaigns better?

Organic search results might not always give a true representation of the success of SEO programs. In fact, performance metrics generated through non-branded search can be more effective than branded ones to demonstrate the success of SEO campaigns. Why? Offline marketing campaigns or any other such marketing efforts can substantially inflate traffic for branded organic queries and is therefore incorrectly attributed to SEO results. A customer being aware of a brand via offline channels like TV might end up searching it online, but counting it as part of organic search in SEO activity can dilute the success results.