SEO Reporting V/S Conversion

Search engine optimization is a process to rank your web site higher on the search engine result pages. This requires researching search engine algorithms and discovering ways to conquer those without fooling search engines. It is the process of creating a site on the parameters of search engines and not using techniques like spamming, cloaking and redirecting etc.

It has been found that, 80% of your traffic comes from search engines. But search engines returns with millions results for a single query. Searchers do not search beyond 2-3 pages. Hence it is very important to position your company in first 2 pages for the important keywords. Search engine optimization is a very cost effective way to attract maximum traffic to your site.

Search engine optimization is part of Online Marketing. And any marketing activity needs investment. But in online world, since it is still growing, there is lot of curiosity among marketers about how to track or measure the performance of the activity.

SEO campaigns offer an advantage over traditional internet advertising methods, such as email campaigns, banner advertising or pay-per-click services. Search Engines marketing offers a unique promotional advantage when it comes to overall return on investment.

A well optimized page typically can deliver thousands of targeted visitors to your website every month. Unlike purchasing mailing lists or other expensive website marketing methods for higher search engine rankings, SEO allows you to deliver long term success and a better ROI.

Most of the time the state of confusion occurs because the success of the campaign is not clearly defined. Marketer must know what they want to achieve. At the end of the campaign you should know that the performance would be measured on the number of visitors or the total number of conversion i.e. the actual sales made on your web site.

First thing to be kept in mind is that ranking is not the only parameter to measure the success of the campaign. The success of the campaign needs to be measure on rankings, percentage of traffic from different search engines, traffic from different keywords all should be considered while tracking ROI of the campaign.

The major success of SEO campaign is ranking at the top of major search engines for popular keywords.

But since search engine algorithms are rapidly evolving no one can promise top rankings now. So the parameter for consideration is now the kind of traffic you are receiving from your keywords. Also it is more important that your keywords should not contain your company name. By measuring non-branded search traffic, we learn more about how your audience looks for you, and can further refine your campaign.

There are many search engines through which you attract traffic. But most of the visitors come through big search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Therefore it is very important to know that which search engine is generating what kind of results. The more the traffic search engine is generating the more the ROI.

Action taken by a visitor is considered to be very important. Though they are not directly purchasing the product, they are definitely our potential customers. Their action include, completing a registration form, or downloading a file etc. Of course, conversion is the ultimate aim.

ROI calculation varies with the type of site. Let’s see how to calculate ROI for an e-commerce site.

Determining ROI for e-commerce site is very easy as the aim of e-commerce is make actual transactions or sell. Generally e-commerce sites trade variety of products. Hence calculate average price of the offerings. Then calculate the total sell web site is making before optimization. We can calculate it by multiplying average price and number of items sold in a month. Then after the search engine optimization calculate the number of items sold. Again multiply it with the average price and you will know the actual sales figure. After calculating the difference between sales pre optimization and post optimization, you can calculate the increase in sales. Now look at the money you have invested in a SEO campaign. If the sales figures can recover that money quickly then you are generating very good ROI else not.

E.g. Average price is 100 and pre optimization sales is 100 units per month, the total sales is 100 x 100=10,000 per month. Post SEO campaign, if sales goes up to 300 mark then you are earning 100 x 300=30,000 per month. So post SEO campaign you are able to increase sales by 20,000. And if you have invested 50,000 for SEO campaign then you can recover it within 2.5 months.