While many businesses still focus on rankings as the key metric for an SEO campaign, savvy businesses have looked beyond rankings. Today businesses are collecting, measuring and comparing the same campaign metrics they have gathered from PPC campaigns.
In addition to rankings, there are five key metrics WebMetro employs to define the success of a client's SEO campaign: rankings, traffic, revenue, ROI, and keyword depth.
1. Link Popularity. Every SEO campaign should have some element of link development. Whether you are developing links from directories, articles, blogs, or Web 2.0 sites, every site should target developing links to support their keywords. Link popularity success can be measured by how PageRank and the number of links increase overtime.
2. Traffic. SEO is often a phased process and one of the phases is the on-page optimization. This process is quite technical and involves everything from optimizing the Title and Meta Tags to HTML changes with the goal of making the website more relevant. When your search engine and non-search engine referrals increase, the optimization is a success.
3. Revenue. Of all the metrics, it is most important to compare revenue generated from natural search annually. Not only should the SEO campaign be credited for monthly gains in revenue, the campaign should also be compared to the same period year-over-year.
4. ROI. True revenue-based ROI is defined by new gross revenue from natural search divided by the cost of the SEO campaign. Say, for example, that the additional gross revenue compared to last year was $5 million and the SEO campaign cost $60,000. The resulting ROI is 83:1- quite a nice return on investment.
5. Keyword Growth. SEO success is also measured by growth in traffic-generating keywords that the campaign site has developed. If this increases yearly, the SEO campaign is doing well. In general more keywords mean more traffic, which means more potential sales, revenue, and increased ROI.