How to Prove the Value of Your SEO Campaign with Data

For years now, companies and clients have believed that seo is some kind of magic formula or a mysterious on and off switch. We all know this is not true. To prove your seo campaign is working and you are delivering on ROI, you as a marketer need data to back it up. You also need to measure and document every on and off site effort in order to properly correlate success or failure to specific tasks as well as figure what has already been done to not go back and overlap

Baselining

In order to see how your campaign is doing over time you need to know where you started. Document as much information as possible especially basic metrics like leads/sales, rankings, and traffic. Figure out where you are in each of these metrics in order to have a number to compare to over time and so that you aren’t going into a campaign blind. Do not only baseline key performance metrics, but also current assets such as number of linking root domains, total backlinks, total amount of indexed pages, domain authority, page authority, how landing pages are currently performing in organic search, among others.

Provide Reports No Matter How Basic

You don’t have to go crazy with elaborate reports, but you do need to present basic information in terms of how your site is doing via Google Analytics, Adobe Site Catalyst, or any other analytics platform you may be using. Some things you may want to touch on are top converting landing pages, customer behavior, unique visitors by page, and traffic sources. These are just basic, but you can also vary primary and secondary dimensions even further to paint different pictures of the overall data sets. Create custom reports and determine how you would like to filter the data. The options you have in terms of break downs in custom reporting are dimension drill downs, metric groups, types, report tabs, and filters.

Establish Value for Each Interaction Created Through SEO

Depending on the vertical you are in you may not be able to find an exact number. Through your website you can use dynamic call tracking to further drill down the value for a specific product or service as well as the value of leads through form submissions. Secondary values for specific actions can be determined for actions like signing up for newsletters. Regardless of what interaction, you need to determine an approximate overall value. Be sure to track assisted conversions as well because a lead or sale that came through a social or paid channel may have originated from an organic result. At the end of the day cover your bases and it will be a lot easier to correlate seo success through your seo efforts.