Before starting any SEO project, I always recommend being perfectly clear on the overall goals you are trying to achieve. Are you looking for more leads, more sales, more traffic, branding — or do you simply want to show off high rankings for keyword X? Each site is a different, and I want to show you how to measure success depending on your own SEO goals.

Let’s say your primary goal is branding…

Perhaps you only care about the amount of traffic to the site because your blog makes ad dollars from page views. In this case, you need to fix your attention on simple metrics that you can gain from your analytics package: a) the amount of search traffic; b) the bounce rate of the search traffic; c) and the direct traffic.

Look for keywords that result in the highest number of visits and the lowest number of bounce rates. Despite what you may think, traffic with a 100% bounce rate is not even good for branding purposes. You need visitors that spend at least a few minutes and demonstrate a minimal level of interest in your content/offer. Also check to see if you are ranking on the first page for these keywords, and preferably above the fold (the first section of the page that does not require scrolling down). The difference in traffic generated between a #1 ranking and a #2 is usually tremendous.

A good way to measure the progress of your branding campaigns is to chart the increase in your direct traffic (people who type your URL into the address bar or arrive from a bookmark). Another important metric is the number of people that come to your site via brand searches (people who typed your company or site name into Google hoping to find you). Traffic coming from brand searches is usually the best converting traffic there is because these are visitors who have already expressed interest in your company or product. If you’re a merchant, don’t make the mistake of bidding in AdWords for brand searches. You should end up with the traffic anyways through organic SEO and it is not smart business to pay twice for the same visitor. However, if you’re an affiliate marketer, the situation is just the opposite. Some merchants don’t understand the process and still allow affiliates bid on brand terms. Some might even encourage it, and that allows you to make a lot of money. Take advantage of those few merchants while you still can!

Now, let’s say your primary goal is sales…

This has to be the goal of most affiliates and small business owners. When your primary goal is sales/conversions/actions, your first order of business is to set up conversion tracking properly. As an affiliate this can be tricky because the “thank you” page is under the merchant’s control. But in cooperation with your affiliate manager you might be able to get your tracking bugs installed on the merchant thank you page. Another alternative is to use your ad network tracking software, which often includes the capability of specifying your tracking bug on the affiliate backend. (I already suggested this feature to the team at Advaliant and I’m sure they will make it available in the next major update.) There is a more advanced technique that I sometimes use involving tracking IDs that I will explain in more detail in a future post.

Tracking conversions essentially means identifying the best keywords and the best sources of traffic so that you can adjust and improve your future traffic generation efforts. I like to set up PPC campaigns not just to drive traffic but also to use “broad match” to find lots of new keywords that I did not consider during my initial keyword research. Focus on the best-converting keywords and try to reach the top spots for them. Remember, the difference in traffic generated between a #1 ranking and a #2 is usually significant and worth your effort.

Final thoughts

Small things can produce big results, but in SEO it’s just as important to step back and look at the big picture. Tiny little tweaks like adding ALT descriptions to images is useful and necessary, but how many new visitors will you gain this way in comparison to the amount of visitors you would have gained by refocusing your keywords to ones with higher traffic and conversions?

If you do a search in Google for “search engine optimization”, “seo” or any similar term you will find countless outdated articles that promote practices that are not very useful these days – i.e.  website submissions, link exchanges, altering meta keyword tags, etc.

These seemingly useful tactics do very little for the ultimate goal of an effective SEO campaign—to drive meaningful traffic.  Because search engines have changed significantly in the last ten years, many of these outdated practices are no longer necessary; while some, like the massive link exchanges are actually considered search engine “spam”.

So if these techniques are not the way to higher search rankings, what are we left with?

Focus on Qualified Visitors

First, you need to think about SEO in terms of specific goals. Think of SEO as anything and everything you can do to your website or landing page to improve the number of qualified visitors who are attracted to it from search engines.  In order to attract these qualified visitors, you should strive to achieve the following 3 goals:

Goal # 1 The most critical is increasing your site’s visibility.  Before a user can find a website on a search engine, the search engine must find that site first!  What’s more, the search engine must also deem the site important (i.e. worthy of having a high place in the index).  At the moment, the major search engines rely primarily on a site’s incoming links. If many large sites link to your content, Google will assume your content is at least somewhat useful.  To increase your site’s visibility you must work on building quality incoming links.

Goal # 2 - The second goal is targeting.  If you want to get more qualified visitors to your website, you must understand which keywords are bringing you the right visitors—visitors that are likely to take action on your site (subscribe to a newsletter, buy something, etc.)  A lot of people who are new to SEO or the Web just want a lot of traffic — but traffic alone will not guarantee success.  What you want is the right kind of traffic, the traffic that will take action on your site. Targeting the right keywords is the best way to accomplish this.

Goal # 3 - The final goal that you should pursue is what I like to call the site’s presence. This involves getting as many pages as possible indexed, especially the ones that are most important to your overall goals. If your content isn’t getting listed then people aren’t going to be finding the most relevant content that you’ve created.

Three Simple Steps to Successful SEO

SEO is not simply about ranking #1 for a random keyword.  Many people will tell you that, but they are missing the point.  The purpose of effective SEO is getting as much traffic for qualified keywords. 

When the right visitors are coming to your site and taking action on your content, then you know you’ve accomplished successful SEO.  But how do you achieve this?  My strategy has 3 distinct steps:

1.     Research – Try to understand where your site is right now.  Are you targeting the right keywords? What’s your market? Are you missing any keyword opportunities? What are your competitors doing? Understanding what successful competitors are doing lets you learn and apply their strategies to your own site.

2.     Create/Promote – The next step is to create an SEO plan that will get you where you need to be. This usually involves creating or reconfiguring content to attract the right type of user with qualified keywords. Just as important, you need to promote your content so that users can find it. There are a lot of tactics to do SEO properly, but here are some basics, many of which I’ve previously discussed in my SEO blog.

• Keyword research
• SEO copywriting
• Social media marketing
• Link building and baiting
• Blogging
• Creating and submitting XML sitemaps
• Duplicate content
• URL rewriting and redirects

3.     Track progress – The final step, and this is one that people often forget, is tracking your progress! How far are you from your specific goals? Periodically checking in will help you understand where you are so that you can learn what worked and what didn’t, as well as those areas that you still have to work on.

It is important to understand that you need to complement your affiliate landing pages with useful content. It is very hard to attract visitors and links to pages that are only sales pitches. Use content pages as pre-selling tools that lead to the affiliate offers. The content pages should be the ones you are trying to optimize.

This is my first post on this blog and I am not sure how educated readers are on SEO.  I hope this has been useful! Please feel free to sound off in the comments.