Did You Gauge Your SEO Campaign’s Success Correctly?

Those of you who need the buzz word translation here it is - when you run a SEO campaign you basically want your company’s website to be easily discovered by your target customers while they search on Google, Yahoo or Bing for products or services that you offer.

Companies hire SEO professional from digital marketing agency who have a bag of tricks to get your website on the top of search ranks and even get you an impressive click-through rate. So if yours is an eStore dealing in apparels and lifestyle products, you hire SEO top-shots and your eCommerce site flashes on top of Google and have thousands of visitors every single day! Hey that sounds like you have hit success with your SEO campaign, doesn’t it. Well, not really.  

Consider this – Your eStore is on page one of Google for ‘red boots’ but there isn’t any order placed for it since weeks. Let’s dig a bit deeper and check out the visitors’ activity after they discover your website. To your surprise, you find the average stay time of visitor is under a second!!

So all your impressive stats on terrific traffic, position in search results AND the time and money spent on SEO campaigns turns out to be giving you no real results.

If it doesn’t get your business, it’s all meaningless. That’s why it’s time to….

Say Good Bye to Tracking Traffic and Say Hello to Tracking Action

Assessing SEO campaign’s success isn’t a rocket science, it’s the usual business on the web. The key is to think backwards. Look at it this way, what is it that you want visitors to do when they land on your website? Continuing the example, the first thing you want them to do is to stay on your site rather than bounce off to your competitors’.

Next would be to have them browse through your eStore collection and check out a few products. You want them to engage with your site. Now that yours is an eCommerce site, expecting some of the visitors turn into paying customers isn’t being unrealistic. So next, you do some math to find out how many of those who have visited your site have made a purchase or have added products to wish list or at least signed in for membership…. You get the picture, right?

When you ask these tough questions to your SEO professional, and you get a positive rely, you know you have truly arrived.

Now that you know what to do, here’s how you do it.

Get an Objective Analysis with Google Analytics

Numbers don’t lie. And that’s what you get with this phenomenal tool, Google Analytics. There is a wealth of information you can find through analytics that can, well, get you lots of wealth. No kidding.

This tool lets you track every move of visitors on your website. The time of the day your website gets the most hits to what products or information is most viewed to which demographics your maximum visitors are coming from. You can find out exactly which pages visitors click on, their information browsing pattern, how long they stay on which pages and a whole lot of stuff that a shrewd businessman would want to know about customer’s psychology.

The report will tell you about repeat visitors and new visitors each month. You can put monthly figures up against each other to see if the numbers have moved up/down from your baseline. It allows you an objective view of the activities on your website, broken down at each level of viewer interaction. Now that you know that Google Analytics can give you such incredible information, invest time in learning to use this tool. You’ll be glad you did.

Track Regularly to Detect the Point of Influx

If you find yourself scratching your head for a possible explanation to – why did leads fall this quarter when we had a bumper sales in the previous quarter - it is recommended you check your analytics frequently to spot those seemingly insignificant slip outs that culminate into a BIG number towards the end of the quarter. Results are not guaranteed when you are dealing with SEO campaigns. Plus, with frequent search algorithm updates in the picture some methods to assess results go obsolete.

Remember, there isn’t any magic matrix to assess the success of your search engine campaigns. And that leads me to:

Learn to Separate Business from Babble

There is a lot of brouhaha about SEO campaigns that claim to get you the top spot in search results. That’s great, maybe they can actually get you the coveted position, but your business deserves even more than that. Why settle for less?