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Fresh Tilled Soil
www.freshtilledsoil.com
By: Richard BanfieldWhich Metrics to Track for SEM?
Tracking keyword ranking is mostly a waste of time yet almost every site owners obsesses over them. So if keyword ranking has little or no value, what does?There has been much debate in the search marketing world about Google's decision to preventautomated tools like Web Position Gold and WebCEO from using ranking data in their reports.It's not surprising but it is disappointing if you are trying to track your target keyword'sperformance on Google's SERPs. In truth there are several more important stats to bewatching. There are performance indicators that offer much more value to the website owner than keyword ranking. Here are the indicators we watch on our own sites and recommend to our clients:
Incoming links:
The quantity and quality of the incoming links to any given website or page willbe as close as you are going to get to knowing your PageRank success potential. Bearing inmind that PageRank is itself not an indicator of success; incoming links will increase theopportunity of being highly ranked by all search engines. Another way links can help is tosuggest future content themes and topics that correlate to audience interests. By looking at thelinks source and content we can see what type of sites and audiences are linking to our sites.
Indexed Pages:
The amount of pages on my site as compared to the amount of pages indexedby a search engine tells me where there might be problems. If Google has 100 pages indexedbut my site has 1000 then there could be several things wrong with my site. The easiest way tosolve this problem is to submit a XML site map to Google and set up a Google Webmaster account to ensure they are indexing my site frequently. The more pages that are indexed themore likely one of them will be found in a search.
Conversions:
At the end of the day we're all looking for conversions. Even sites making moneyfrom advertising are still shooting for email newsletter signups, form submissions, subscriptionsand registrations for alerts. For ecommerce sites the conversion rate is the lifeblood of the site.If you need to be obsessed with a statistic then this is the one to get crazy about. Constantlydoing A-B testing on offers, page layouts, user interface improvements and keyword choicesshould be the guiding direction of all your analytics.
Title Tags:
One other measurement we trust is how long does it take for a new page with newtitle tags to be indexed. Understanding the gestation period of a new page or a recentlyreworked page in terms of first page is critical to knowing when and how you can launch newoffers or optimize an existing page.
Organic traffic vs. paid traffic:
Any site worth its mettle should be trying to replace aid trafficwith organic traffic. My goal with any new site is to quickly move the traffic from the instant-gratification paid advertising to the long-term optimized organic traffic. Some sites can benefitfrom having both paid and organic but only one is sustainable. There is also a direct relationshipbetween organic traffic and conversions. A site's ROI is much higher for organic traffic so willalways be my first choice for any future investment.
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