There is a popular saying “If you can measure it, you can improve it”. Measurement is one of the critical factors while determining results. Having a process in place to track the monetary value of conversions rate offers you the opportunity to determine the ROI of your SEO campaign. So what are the metrics which we need to track? Confused!! It primarily depends on the business of the client. Each business will have some key performance indicators which determine the ROI. In this blog I will be explaining some of the key performance indicator by which can be employed to measure the SEO success.
( source : Shutterstock)
Tools used for analysis:
- Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster
- Ahrefs
- AdLuge
Acquisition
Recently Google announced some changes in reporting by announcing the launch of Acquisition reports. This report provides the acquisition-behaviour-conversion in the same window, making the analysis easier when compared to the past. This report clearly shows how you acquire visitors, their behaviour on the site after acquisition and their conversion path. This channel will clearly show the visitor count from search engines, i.e. Organic Search & the percentage of conversion through the channel. An analysis of this report will give us an overview of the channel which would be successful in bringing visitors to the site and its conversions. You can switch the conversion data that is presented in the report, by selecting an individual goal or even your e-commerce data.
Google Analytics >Acquisition Report
In the above screen we can see that ‘Organic Search’ is the channel from where the site is receiving maximum number of visitors. Correlating this with Behaviour & Conversions will allow marketers to analyse and track the success rate. Note: Business objectives are different for each category of websites and hence goal differs too. Digging deeper into the report will give more insight into the various medium/source.
Google Analytics >Acquisition Report
Behaviour
Analyzing and understanding user behaviour is a significant factor in measuring success. Analyzing the behavioural flow of visitors will determine the pages that the users mostly visit and this will allow us to improve the user interaction/navigation in the site.
Google Analytics > Visitors Flow
Search Queries
After Google encrypted the user search query, marketers faced a tough time in analysing the keywords data. Rather than finding a way to hack search query we must find an alternative solution for analyzing the keyword/search query. Search queries from webmaster will give you an idea of terms (search queries) for which the site is getting ranked in Google. The impression data, keyword position & CTR are valuable metrics to analyze the status of a site. Unfortunately they do not give us an absolutely accurate data when compared with Google analytics and also, webmaster gives us 90 days of historical data and you can see change data for time periods of 30 days.
Google Webmaster Tools > Search Traffic > Search Queries
The search queries can be classified as per the pages which indeed will help us understand the search terms for which the page gets clicks and rankings. Search Queries can tell you two things which Google Analytics doesn’t i.e. estimated rank and estimated click-through rates. Search Queries can be helpful, and you can link Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics so that you can do side-by-side comparisons.
Backlinks
Backlink is one of the important factors in SEO, and quality links will help in gaining higher positions in SERP & referral visits. One of the best tools which I prefer to use is Ahrefs. Some of the key performing factors while analyzing the backlink of a site are as follows:
- Referring Domain Count
- Backlink Count
- Backlink Type
- Anchor Text Distribution
Referring Domain count shows the number of unique domain linked to the site. The higher the count, the more popular your site is, but that alone does not mean higher quantity of links will make your site rank higher in SERP.
Ahrefs> Site Explorer > Overview
The quality of these domains affects the quality of your site. Ahrefs makes it very easy for a user to analyze these metrics.
Ahrefs> Site Explorer> Referring Domains> Referring
Ahrefs assigns rank to each site and it makes it easy for us to sort referring domain as per rank. After sorting we can analyze the exact link by clicking on the ‘Backlinks’ option. This makes it easy to find the exact place from where your site is linked.
Ahrefs> Site Explorer> Referring Domains> Referring> Hit ” Backlinks”
Anchor Text Distribution
This report will help you to identify the ‘Referring Domain Count’ with the percentage of distribution.
Ahrefs> Site Explorer> Backlinks> Anchors
From the same dashboard you can analyze the referring domain and the exact path from where your site is linked.
Ahrefs> Site Explorer> Backlinks> Anchors> Hit ” Domains”
Conversion
Google analytics can be the best free tool which you can use for analyzing conversions (as goals) but I prefer using AdLuge so that I can analyze the actual conversions, the channels through which each lead converted, the path followed by each lead during conversion. Here is an excellent marketing funnel which can help us to analyze how conversion happens.
Source: http://kaiserthesage.com
In a marketing point of view we need to measure the rate of conversion through each channel, only then you can understand which channel offers more conversion and which channel needs to be improved. Differentiating the conversion as per Medium/Channels renders more idea about the marketing effort in each channel & the ROI can be easily calculated. 
Measuring the leads as per Source will provide more information regarding the performance of each campaign. 
The SEO campaign and business objectives are the deciding factors for using such lead tracking tool.
Conclusion
Choosing the right metrics to track and analyse, and setting up the right method of analyzing are the very first steps in kicking off a successful SEO campaign. Analyzing these KPIs will also help you to make the best decisions to ensure future success. How do you measure your SEO success rate? I’d love to hear in the comment sections.
