In the old days, one simply looked at total organic traffic from month to month as a primary metric of success. As we have become more sophisticated over the years, we now correlate rankings and traffic so we can identify which ranking changes actually had an effect on traffic. This prevents SEOs from needlessly spending effort on addressing changes that don’t have an effect on bottom line. One of the biggest challenges in any SEO campaign is how to provide maximum ROI for a client on an ongoing basis.
Brand vs. Non-Brand Keywords
So in addition to correlating specific ranking changes with organic referring traffic levels, and in order to understand SEO performance, we need to segment brand versus non-brand keywords. Doing so allows us to understand whether the overall traffic levels changed as a result of better saturation across generic terms (indicating more market share exposure) or if more awareness and demand has been generated in the marketplace as a result of non-organic search online marketing and offline marketing efforts.
Understanding traffic variances in lieu of changes in demand to brand-related terms and correlating those changes with marketing efforts allows us to better understand real SEO performance, and also can be used as additional data to evaluate the relative success of all marketing initiatives (by comparing which events have the biggest impact on brand related organic search).
In addition to understanding the difference between brand and non-brand related traffic, it’s important to understand the long tail performance of high priority keywords within each of these two segments. Activities performed in the “Continuous Phase,” which are targeted toward a particular keyword phrase, will often have an effect on longer tail permutations of the same phrase.
So now we’re measuring overall organic traffic, segmenting it by brand and non-brand related traffic, and within each segment we then analyze the long tail performance of high priority keywords. Then we compare these numbers to year-over-year numbers to understand performance.
Comparing month-over-month numbers is useful to understand trends and identify abnormal patterns, but performance needs to be measured from a year-over-year standpoint to account for seasonality. Much the same as most organizations, compare year-over-year sales numbers by month to evaluate performance and growth.
Another challenge is that for large sites, traffic fluctuations can occur across a number of terms that were outside the scope of the campaign (or weren’t targeted by ongoing efforts). These fluctuations can sometimes overshadow other important gains made across high priority keywords where traffic volume isn’t necessarily more important than quality based on conversion numbers. For this reason, it’s helpful to further refine our reporting within the long tail brand and non-brand segments to a “campaign level.”
Organizing related keyword groups into campaigns, similar to paid search campaigns, helps us understand SEO performance within high priority keyword segments that may not be evident for large sites with tons of data. Especially in situations where the amount of resources that is being spent on ongoing SEO activities only affects a small segment of keywords.
Correlating rankings to traffic, organizing organic traffic referring keywords into two groups, brand and non-brand, and then measuring the long tail performance of keywords within those groups and breaking them into related campaigns is an essential part of reporting and understanding SEO success. But most of the process that we have discussed is focused on only half of the equation, which is how to report on traffic from an SEO perspective.
Via : http://www.sudhirseo.com/2010/07/seo-success-measurement-challenges/
By Nikke Tech Digital Marketing Training Institute in Faridabad
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