expertSEM

Do you care what you get for your hard earned cash? If you buy a toaster, do you mind when it only cooks the right side of your bagel? I’m going to take a shot in the dark that yes, yes you do. Well believe me when I say it should be no different when it comes to your marketing dollar. Search Engine Optimization is still a new concept for most people, even for many of those in the search industry. Unlike pay per click where you can track exactly how much you got for what you spent, SEO is illusive and unpredictable. Therefore, as someone who receives money for SEO services rendered, it’s my job to make sure my clients are as satisfied as possible with their purchase. My tip this week is what you should expect to see (if you’re the client) or be sure to include (if you’re the agency) within your SEO campaign reports:

1. Keyword positions within the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing). Make these keyword lists as robust as possible, because even if you are focused on a tight group of words, these efforts should have a trickle-down effect on various others.
2. Traffic by keyword, using the same keywords as above as well as any others found to bring in a decent volume of visits. For this you need to make sure the paid traffic is broken out from the organic within the website analytics.
3. Conversions/actions by keyword. This will be the true indicator if your SEO campaign is working. So what if you get keyword A to position one in Google if it doesn’t convert?
4. Visits by keyword in relation to their position. This report combines the first two I mentioned, only this gives some perspective as to how the potential of each keyword. For instance, if keyword A is bringing in hundreds of visits but is only on the bottom of page one, then you better start working to get it to the top.
5. Number of backlinks over time. This is great indicator of whether the link building campaign is really building links.
6. Monitor the website stats with Quantcast, Compete and Alexa, and hopefully they will show that the value of the website is growing.
7. Using a tool like SpyFu that crawls Google for all keywords ranking for your website as well as your competitors, you can track how many are in positions 1, 2 and 3, and pages 1, 2 and 3 each month to make sure that those numbers are increasing.

BUT, my most important recommendation to you is this: Get all of this data first BEFORE the campaign starts so that you can truly prove the value of the SEO efforts.