Remember when you could achieve a number 1 position for your client’s most important keyword and claim success for their SEO campaign? Regardless of any other metric, if you got them a high rank for one or many of their keywords, you were respected. Ahhh, those were the good old days! There are a myriad of reasons why we just can’t do that anymore. Today, we can’t measure rankings like we used to because of personalization, social factors and missing keyword data within analytics. In addition, 85% of Google results have some kind of rich information in them which means we can’t see a rank for just a rank. There are too many elements to interpret.
Showing a client that they went from position A to position B is no longer the best way to measure the value of your efforts. So, if we can’t depend on keyword rankings, how can we gauge a successful SEO Campaign?
A. Indicate the Key Performance Indicators. What does the client consider a win? Do they want more traffic? Do they want a lower bounce rate? Do they want more form inquiries? More phone calls? Do they desire more white paper downloads? Identifying these indicators will give you goals to work towards.
B. Show Conversions. Once you determine what the client considers important to grow their business online, work towards those goals and show them the conversion improvements. One particular client of mine had a decrease in traffic for January 2014 by 6%. If I was only reporting on this metric, the client might be disappointed because he’s not seeing the full picture of the campaign. However, according to their KPI’s, I was charged with the goal to increase their form inquiries … which I did by 45%. Beside this metric, the slight decrease in traffic becomes less disturbing.
Increasing conversions through search is our focus. Keyword rankings are not.
Feel free to share how you have increased conversions through seo or submit questions on how to plan a successful seo campaign within the comments section. We value your input!