How should my SEO work be measured

[tidybooks]

Hi

Seems a bit of silly question but I have been working at company for over a year now,  I was brought in to do SEO, social media and website management as an intern whilst I have done social media before the SEO side of things before was something I had to learn on the job and as we are very small company this was done through my own research which meant learning all sides from onsite to link building etc also learning how to understand Goggle analytics and google webmaster.

We are childrens bookcase company specializing in childrens bookcases and other book storage - www.tidy-books.com

My issue is other than revenue generated, traffic and conversion rates for direct sales I have no other KPIs . If I was working for SEO company what would the general KPIs be? Obviusoly where your keywords rank in google but what other factors? The reason I ask is I basically have 3 set of tasks I do for the company I handle all the social media platforms so easy to measure that, I help and do a lot of research in to ecommerce webdesign to help with conversion rates, manage magneto back end side of things and make sure are SEO is up to scratch. Whilst ultimately it’s the revenue generated that is my main thing it would be good to able to say to my boss that I’m achieving the certain SEO KPIs as she has no idea about that side of things.

I have general set of keywords i.e childrens bookcases, kids bookcases, childrens book storage etc  - which on average get ranked on first page google.co.uk

I’m in the process of building up long tail keywords based around questions like “what would you buy a 1 year old” etc

The one other issue I have is we have 1 top level domain which is tidy-books.com this directed at America as we sell in the US, UK, EU we then have a ip redirect that will say redirect to tidy-books.co.uk whilst I know that’s not ideal the size of the company doesn’t allow for separate domain management at present. This causes big problems as I need to rank for childrens bookcases as that’s our main product the problem being the our top level domain is .com and directed and the US I have to use kids more than childrens.

Basically to some up im getting asked to provide proof of my work and it would be great to know what I should be telling my boss when she asks me about the SEO side of things.

Hope this makes sense kind of at lost

[S_Curtis]

Well it's right that revenue is the most important but you might want to also look at % share of revenue online which make your measure of performance less dependent on how the business is doing as a whole.  Even if the revenue is dropping as long as you are doing better than offline sales you would meet your target. Other KPIs might be:

• SEO traffic or SEO share of traffic
• Bounce rate
• Orders as you don't set the price this is less dependent on stock and more depended on your performance

Hope that helps?

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Geraldine,

Whilst revenue and profit are the clear priority for you, it is good to measure a variety of things. What I ask my team to look at is the bounce rate and conversion rate of certain category and product pages, it is interesting to look at these rates because it will show you what you need to do in order to improve the quality of the page. If you see that a certain product has a high/low bounce or conversion rate you can look at why that may be. Remember, it is easier to convert existing visitors rather than attract new visitors.

You can also monitor rankings compared to your main competitors, if you haven't been tracking this then start to keep a record of them. Look at mentions of your brand on social networks as brand building is all part of the SEO process.

[tidybooks]

Thank you to both for answering the question and that has provided me with some solid information.

As mentioned I handle a lot of other areas which I guess all connect up to SEO but are time consuming  themselves i.e creating engaging social media content or blog content, website management i.e solving an issues in google webaster and other tasks.

Should the actual meat and potatoes of SEO i.e keywords ranking/research, Google analytics  be a full time task. It comes down to the fact that that I will be myself  getting an intern so the way I see I can focus on the above mentioned by your guys whilst getting the intern to handle the more content creating parts and social media.

Thanks again for the help

[TammyWood]

There are many pre-formatted dashboards within the Google Analytics community. Using a combination of these to create VP level reports is a good way to align expectations with goals. The meat and potatoes of your job sounds like a well rounded successful campaign that resulted in increase in traffic and sales- regardless of the source.

I would utilize a few dashboards, to nail down the specifics:

1. Traffic from Organic Searches & Sales From Organic Sources

2. Traffic from Social Sources & Sales From Social Sources

3. Transactions from Campaigns- ( paid, newsletters, emails, articles) - tracking installed obviously.

4. Over all rankings of Keywords that resulted in sales- after all who wants to be number 1 for shiny yellow thing, when you don't sell shiny yellow things.

An executive overview or scorecard for these successes could be used as a glance through- at the top of the monthly report. What worked, what changed, what needs changing and the successes that are monitored.

I hope this helps-