This final post in the six part series looks at how you can measure your SEO campaign. Like any marketing activity, you must measure and track progress if you are to ascertain the level of success. Using a tool such as Google Analytics, will give you the statistics required to measure the changes, improvement and success of your website.

What should you track?

• Search engine referrals: What search engines are sending visitor to your site and what keywords are being used to find your site?
• Other referrals: What other sites are directing visitors to your site? This will show you where your valuable links are coming from. For example, seeing that 10% of your traffic came via your articles on eZine may prompt you to boost your article marketing campaign
• Returning Vs Unique Visitors: Are most of your new, unique visits, or are they returning visitors? This metric will show you how often people are coming back to your site – if you have a site that consistently produces regular content, you will want to see a high number of people returning to your site to read it
• Entry and exit pages: What pages do most people land on when they arrive at your site, and what are the pages that people are leaving from. If a lot of visitors leave from a key page, you may want to think about amending that page to try and reduce that figure
• Pathways: What path do visitors take when they’re on your site? Ideally you should create a ‘funnel’ where people land on a specific page and are guided through your site to the desired action page (such as a checkout or the Contact Us form). Understanding the path people take will help you improve the usability and conversion rate of your site
• Popular Pages: What pages are viewed most on your site? You can use this information to improve other pages that aren’t so well visited.

Of course the main thing you need to track are your conversions, and the route leading up to those conversions – what keyword was used, what search engine, what entry path did they take, what pages did they visit, how long did they stay on your site, were they a new or a returning visitor? Tracking your success will help you build a stronger, more focused campaign.

However, it’s equally important to measure failure – what isn’t working, what pages have a high bounce rate, what keywords have a high bounce rate, what article got no views at all etc… These are all important metrics that can be used to enhance your campaign plan.

So that’s it – the six part series explaining the basics of SEO is over. If you have any questions, please get in touch or leave us a comment. At SMEketing we’re passionate about search engine optimisation; if you feel we could help you and your site, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.