So you’ve gone to the trouble of hiring a SEO company, the next question is how to you measure their effectiveness ? Has the onsite and offsite changes they’ve done had any impact ? It’s natural to want to see what the return on your investment is, and it’s important that you understand what the numbers really mean.
Often companies will tell you are ranking for X number of new keywords, which in itself tells you nothing. These words are useless unless they are driving traffic (and converting) to your site. The actual improvement can be hard to see unless you specifically look at organic traffic in your statistical package.
In Google Analytics you can filter just for organic traffic, so paid, direct type-in and referral traffic isn’t counted. It’s a little hidden in the control panel, so to help you we’ve outlined the steps : Go to
Traffic Sources
- >>> Sources
- >>>>> Search
- >>>>>>> Overview
This would be the first step. Then you need to compare it against a base level. Here we’ve compared the current month to the previous month.
Your Organic Traffic
Here we see that the number of organic traffic is up by over 70%. The next stage is to check to see how many keywords are delivering traffic to us. Generally it’s better to be ranking for more keywords.
How many keywords do I rank for ?
If you unclick compare to past in the dates field and select Organic under Overview on the left hand side menu.
At the bottom of the right of the table (highlighted in green) you will see the number of keywords that brought you traffic for that period of time.
Technically this shows you only the keywords that drive traffic to you. And a good starting point would be to look at where you are ranking for these to see if you can move up a further 1 or 2 places. In our case there are over 2000 different unique keywords delivering traffic so this should be a good starting point to work on in the next few months. You will also find that once you focus on these keywords, you will also start to get traffic from even more keywords, so it’s a cycle that will never end !
A sudden drop in the number of keywords you rank for is a good indicator of a google penalty being applied.
Thanks
A big thanks goes to my clients for allowing me to share these graphs, you guys rock !
