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Avatar Went Hot: April 16, 2008 - 1:56 pm
Posted By: kichus 81 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.kichus.in)
Category: SEO
How you measure your SEO success, is that only the Ranking Reports? or should you use other KPIs? A detailed post about how to measure your SEO success matches with your actual Goals.
9 Comments     

Comments

from bwelford 80 days ago #
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This is a good meaty post. Perhaps the only dimension that could be usefully added is something on conversions, whereby visitors click through and help the website owner achieve his/her objectives.

from MikeDammann 80 days ago #
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The only true way of measuring SEO success is by the increase of ROI. You can sell a client on whatever term you want, you can give them vanity rankings or generate mass loads of crap traffic that may impress them, but if you don't generate traffic increasing business, you have done nothing.
If you have a client and can set something up to where you can measure revenue generated with them, and you see a drastic increase after you have been working on their sites for a little while, then you have done your job.
Of course, that traffic generating business would not just come from search engines.
It will also come from "real links", banner advertising and whatever else you provide.
But overall you as an SEO need to have some sort of cooperation from the webmaster in helping you do your job right.
Unfortunately many website owners don't have enough of a business mind encouraging shady SEOs to do their thing.

All in all, it's about money. Nitpicking over a few keyterms while ignoring the big picture is going to turn into a big waste of time.

from BogglesMyMind 79 days ago # - show/hide this comment
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I decided to add my comment to the original article about this subject...http://sphinn.com/story/26114

from JacobKerr 79 days ago #
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I spent a good 1.5hr reading this article and all the articles linked to within the content of this article. Very informative, thanx!

from KevinCheng 79 days ago #
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The most important report that the business needs is the ROI report like Mike said. Ranking doesn't mean anything if it doesn't convert into page views, purchases or whatever the bottomline of the company.

from emanuelh 79 days ago #
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It is the client's responsibility to finance SEO experiments looking for positive ROI, and among
alternative solutions for the best ROI. You cannot know in advance. Moreover, positive ROI may turn negative when his competitors push him down the rankings.   

from JeffMHoward 79 days ago #
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You also need to take into consideration that not all SEO consultants or agencies have control of the landing pages and content/design of sites. In a perfect word SEO could be ranked on a dollar per dollar basis through a variety of ROI metrics.

I believe if you are consulting as a SEO it is only your responsibility to provide rankings updates, and this should be disclaimed up front. If you take it upon yourself to report lots of metrics (unless you are about to lose the client) you will be digging yourself a hole.

SEO should do there best to pick a variety of words that can lead to conversions for a site and then get them ranked. Anything more is analytics reporting and that is another separate service clients should understand the value of.

Client expectations can save you a lot of work. Now if you work in house, then have at it. Thats the beauty of in house :)

from kichus 79 days ago #
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Thanks for the comments mates... much encouraging     

from kichus 78 days ago #
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@Mike and others: I've some reasons for why i didn't include the ROI or conversion tracking part in my post.

1. I don't believe, getting the website sells is not the mere duty of an SEO. That should be a team responsibity including designers, developers, content writers, business analyst, usability experts, web analysts, decision makers, and of course SEO is a part of it. I agree that in some scenarios, an SEO forced to take care of everything, but that makes him more than an SEO.

2. Lots of posts are there in the web talking about how to track the conversions and why it is important. I just thought of giving it a different approach.

I am glad all of you enjoy reading. I've added one more post today, that's already in the first page of sphinn, you may enjoy that also.        


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