The Most Essential SEO Data To Measure
If you are doing your own search engine optimization or even you have have hired an SEO firm, then you’ll want to make sure that you measure certain data to determine whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off. There are all sorts of data that you can measure, but I’ve narrowed down the list to the ones that absolutely are essential data sets for every business owner or marketer to measure.
- Sales, Leads aka Conversions – At the end of the day all of your online and offline marketing efforts come down to increasing and generating sales for your business. Often many times people tend to loose sight of this key aspect and how truly important it is. The only difference is that search engine optimization is a long term and on going. Have patience and measure your sales and conversion increase over time.
- Organic Website Visitors – Tied directly into increasing conversions, over time the key measurable area is how many visitors is your website receiving as a result of your SEO efforts. This means out of all of the keyword phrases that you targeted on your website how many organic (from the 3 major search engines) visitors is your website getting. A simple way to break down the return on investment for this is to add up your monthly SEO service fee or your time (if doing your SEO on your own) and divide the into the money spent. Along with sales this is a good way to gauge how well things are going. I often explain to my SEO clients that if you are spending $5 on average per click for your PPC advertising (although not directly apples to apples with SEO visitors) but if you organic visitors on average cost $.25 then things are looking pretty good!
- Keyword Rankings – By keyword rankings I mean the actual search engine rankings of each page on your site for each keyword that is important to that page. If you have a 10-page website and each page has a primary and a secondary keyword that it has been optimized for, that’s 20 keyword rankings you should concern yourself with. Over the past several years keyword positioning has started to diminish as a key goal (I am so glad!). With universal search, social search and the keyword rankings that fluctuate sometimes daily based on datacenter and visitor location, this is still an important measurement, but 3rd on my list.
- Indexed Web Pages – How many pages you have indexed at each search engine is important. If your website has 100 pages published and you have 90 pages indexed at Google, 94 pages indexed at Yahoo!, 52 at Bing, and 87 at Ask, you’ve got a red flag. That 52 pages at Bing needs to be looked at more critically. Why only 52? Why isn’t Bing indexing more pages? Keep an eye on this metric and make sure that your pages are getting indexed.
- Inbound Links – Finally, the number of relevant inbound links your site has, and each page has, point to it. Obviously, link building is important so make sure your links are getting counted by Google webmaster tools. Also, be sure to build your links the right ways, through highly relevant incoming links from many different sources, over time.
13 Responses to “The Most Essential SEO Data To Measure”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
Thanks for the very helpful information about SEO. I enjoyed reading your article and I found it very interesting. Staying tuned for more.
It good that you got sales leads up there at number 1. People forget that the most improtant thing is not to be number 1 in listings but to actually get sales conversions!
Thanks for reading Sue!
Hi Chris,
It is a major thing that people forget so that why is is #1 in my book
How can I tell how many inbound links are coming to each page of my website? Is there a tool you use to do this?
I think 4 and 5 Should be switched. You won’t get the conversions, traffic or rankings on the pages that are indexed without the links.
Thanks for the article. My question is, if one engine isn’t indexing as much as another, how does a person fix that? Does one have to manually submit the missing pages?
Thanks.
Hi Nick,
I read everyone of your newsletters – this one is one of my favorites and I will likely repost/tweet with your permission?
As an optimization consultant – I have this (or a similar) conversation multiple times a week – glad to know I’m not alone
Keep up the good work!
Happy trails,
Dustin
What a great list. Thanks. I hear so many people talk about nothing besides inbound links and that is last on your list. But if you are not even being indexed, then obviously that is an issue.
I sure appreciate all your good information Nick.
LG
Hi Nick,
Great post once again.
I would add subscribers to your blogs, feeds, newsletters etc, as another measure of the effectveness of your SEO.
Thanks,
Rifki
Hi Nick,
You made some excellent points with this article. Here are a couple of additional thoughts to complement what you have written.
I agree that your metric #1 is incredibly important to the success of any for-profit website (hence your #1 ranking), and unlike your other three metrics it is directly attributable to on-page SEO and “salesmanship.” If you don’t convert your visitors to sales, then all of your other SEO efforts are worthless. Webmasters should test headline and copy variations, offers, guarantees, etc. in an never-ending effort to close 100% of the prospects that visit their site.
Building backlinks is extremely important to the success of any website because they improve all of your metrics except #1. In fact, backlinks are so important that I would rank them #2 (behind closing sales) for the following reasons:
1. According to information published by Google, the more links you have pointing to your site, the more pages in your site Google will index. Thus, links are critical to improving the metric in your point #4. (I’m not sure if this applies to Bing/Yahoo as I haven’t seen anything indicating this that was directly published by them.)
2. Your rankings in SERPs for your keywords (your metric #3), are directly attributable to the number of high-quality backlinks pointing to your website using those keywords in the anchor text. This fact is universal to all of the major search engines. So to improve your SERP rankings for your keywords, you need to build more backlinks using those keywords.
3. More than 87% of all organic traffic originates from searches in search engines or from links themselves. As a result, building backlinks is extremely critical to increasing your metric #2.
Again, thank you for raising this subject and providing valuable advice. Keep up the good work Nick, and I hope you have a great 2010!
Hi Gisela,
Thanks for the question. Honestly, that is a much deeper and complex question. I would start by reading each of the search engine webmaster guidelines. Then I would make sure you have an updated XML sitemap. Other than that, this would need to be looked at much deeper.
Hi Dustin,
Please feel free to reference this post any way you see fit. Thanks for being a loyal reader!
Hi Rifki,
Excellent point, and a great one to add to the list!
Hi MasterLinker,
Excellent additional points, thanks so much for sharing this information with everyone. Have a happy new year as well!
Great list and always good to see conversion as a point of data to measure. I do have questions around the number of pages indexed, as does this include those in the supplementary index?
Thanks David for the comment!