One of the most difficult aspects of SEO for the novice website owner or marketer is tracking the most important statistics pertaining to their SEO performance. A lot of time is spent looking at the PageRank of a website or considering the ranking for one specific keyword and while the latter is genuinely useful information the former is one area that should attract little more than this early research. Without going in to too much detail, which has been reserved for another article, the representation of PageRank that is displayed on Google’s toolbar is misleading and not representative of your SEO efforts.
Website Ranking
The ranking of a website is important to measuring your SEO success but it is far from being the only figure you should track. In fact, there is a case to be made that it isn’t the most important figure to keep track of either. Targeted traffic is the ultimate goal in any SEO campaign meaning that the traffic figures for your website generated through the search results is a much more viable figure to keep tabs on. Realistically, though, the more statistics and trends you do track the better position you will be in.
Determining SEO Effectiveness
Measuring your ranking can help identify areas for improvement. It can indicate those keywords that you need to conduct more optimisation for, but considering the ranking alone may lead to you paying attention to keywords that have proven less than profitable and have even generated very little traffic. This is why it is vital to consider both your search ranking and your traffic levels that have been generated as a result of those rankings.
Improving SEO
Throughout the life of an SEO campaign you should attempt to determine areas for possible improvement. This may mean new keywords that once weren’t viable or beneficial but have now come to the fore and it will most certainly mean the continuation of a link building project because links help to improve rankings and increase traffic.
Targeted Traffic Generation
SEO projects are geared towards the generation of targeted traffic and this means that you need to find some way of measuring how targeted the traffic is that your rankings are generating. Careful monitoring of website traffic should allow you to determine how many search engine visitors are making purchases, clicking links, and taking other actions and good statistics will let you ascertain the average sale or profit value that is generated by each of these visitors. This allows you to determine how effective your SEO is as well as how effective a specific keyword is – these are the rankings you should concentrate on.
SEO Optimisation
SEO is all about optimisation from the very beginning of keyword research to the continued improvement, or optimisation, of the campaign itself. Tracking results and measuring performance is an essential ingredient to the proper ongoing optimisation of your campaign and it can highlight areas for improvement, new keywords to target, and the efficacy of your overall SEO efforts as long as you track the relevant data and ignore the ineffective data.
