Measuring SEO — why you should think beyond your search ranking

Most businesses that I talk to about Search Engine Optimization have only one objective and one success metric in mind when they’re planning SEO campaigns — they want to be in the top X results for relevant searches.

On the face of it, that makes sense. The top results for the top searches have the most visibility, so they should drive the best Return on Investment, right?

Sometimes.

Maybe.

But not always.

Here’s a story to illustrate what I mean.

A client of ours was recently approached by a competitor. The competitor was going out of business and was looking to sell some assets, mainly a portfolio of highly relevant domain names and a highly search optimized Web site.

And I mean HIGHLY optimized — these guys were easily in the top 3 to 5 results for just about every high volume search in their industry. Very impressive.

But here they were shutting down the business — not selling it — with their only sell-able asset essentially being their search visibility. I couldn’t figure it out at first.

What was happening?

Well, it turns out search visibility is only half the story. Even though this competitor had incredibly high visibility for tens of thousands of searches every month, they were actually only generating about as much TRAFFIC from search engines as our client, who had invested a fraction as much in pure rankings.

Simply put, even though this competitor was being seen by a lot more people and spending a lot more on optimization than our client, fewer people were clicking through on their search listing.

That’s bad ROI.

So how do you know if your getting good ROI from your SEO?

I suggest these key metrics:

• total visits from organic (unpaid) search — isn’t what you’re ultimately trying to do with organic SEO to generate traffic? So why not measure it directly instead of through the second-hand measure of search rank?
• cost per visit for unpaid search — take your organic SEO budget for the period and divide it by the number of visits you get. This gives you a point of comparison with your paid advertising options.
• Cost per conversion for unpaid search. It doesn’t matter how high you rank in search results or how many searchers click through on your site if they don’t become leads or customers. Measure the things that matter.

Measuring ROI for SEO well is important. It helps you to do optimization better and it helps you make better decisions about your overall online marketing mix.

And it might just mean the difference between being the buyer or being the seller at the Going Out Of Business sale.