How far does your website do for you? Does it provide you with good returns? Moreover, as web developers or SEO engineers who apply SEO technique on their websites, you need to integrate other tactics so that you can set up and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for their SEO campaigns. Then, show about how these tactics result in inquiries over time.
Step #1: Determine what will be measured (KPIs)
By having a good SEO program, a company can meet many marketing goals. For instance, including awareness of the company and educating buyers which help drive inquiries. Here are some of the things a small manufacturer can measure as part of the SEO marketing program.
You can try the easiest way to measure the KPIs. One of the ways is through the form data from a CMS such as WordPress and then analyze it. Moreover, you can also get better data by tracking the KPI in Google Analytics. To do this, you need to create a thank-you page that people will see once they click the “submit’ button on the form.
By knowing a simple goal like this, you will earn a great deal of other information in Analytics. For example, you can discover which marketing channels assist or result in Goal completions. Moreover, you can also examine on how many sessions it takes for people to get to conversion.
Inquiry calls and emails. Tracking inquiries could be easier if you use a simple Google spreadsheet. This is because Google spreadsheet is so easy to set up and use. Moreover, the company doesn’t have a CRM which makes it good for more than one person to view and track information.
Closed sales by channel. To find out if SEO creates the right kind of inquiries, you can analyze it through your traffic data. Due to having high traffic doesn’t always mean get the right kind of traffic. Some of the things we like to track and measure are:
- Filtered data – By using filtered data, the bot filtering will tell you how much spam comes in to your sites.
- Landing pages – Are people finding the content we’re creating and optimizing?
- Conversions by channel – which channels, search, direct, referrals, email drive conversions?
- Referrals – If we’ve been working on a PR campaign or creating inbound links, is this work paying off?
Step #2: Set a baseline and targets
Determine your target is important. You may want to achieve a 20 percent increase in website sessions, inquiries and so forth. However, you may need to know your baseline. A baseline is the starting point for what you’ll be measuring. In fact, you can derive data from the previous three six or 12 months.
Step #3: Determine how you will measure and when
When it comes to track the ROI of an SEO program, it will generally involve Google Search Console and Google Analytics. For smaller manufacturers or businesses, looking at Analytics every day is like looking at the stock market. So, to simplify it, you can create a simple chart based on specific period of time such as monthly, every other month or quarterly then measure and analyze your results.
Step #4: Create the Marketing Strategy
SEO is not only about Google, but it is also about strategic marketing plan. The written strategy that ties into the company’s business objectives should include:
- Target audience
- Industry overview
- Competitive analysis
- Outline of the sales process, sales cycle and sales challenges;
- Marketing tactics in play or the ones you want to add;
- KPIs, how you’ll measure them and your goals for the next 12 months and so on; and
- Marketing calendar.