Working in SEO, a question we often get asked is “what KPIs should I use to track my efforts?” While key performance indicators used to measure success will vary based on the specific initiatives of each organization, we’ve outlined a few that we suggest all organizations measure:

1. Linkbacks – tracking the number of linkbacks to your site from other sites can provide valuable insight into several things– a) the value and quality of your content and b) the success of your own linking efforts. If your content is of value to people in your industry, you’ll notice that links to your content are building themselves. Imagine you’re writing a blog on ways to automate Twitter tweets. If you find a good article that discusses how to do so, you may link to it. Furthermore, if you find a good service for automating Twitter tweets, you may link to that as well. The goal here is to be providing content that gives other sites a reason to link to your content. If you’re just starting out and placing links for yourself, tracking linkbacks is a good way to measure how effectively you’re placing links for your own site. Yahoo Site Explorer is a great tool to get started with tracking inbound links.
2. SERP rankings – to measure your success in optimizing for specific keywords, we recommend tracking where you place in search engine results pages for particular terms. Start with something simple and set up a spreadsheet using Google Docs with each of your keywords listed in its own row. On a weekly or monthly basis, run a search for these terms (make sure you disable personalized search results by appending &pws=0 to the end of the search url) and track changes in search rank for each term. You can also download a host of tools to do this automatically, but if your starting with ten or so terms, doing the SEO grunt work yourself isn’t terribly cumbersome.
3. PageRank – your PageRank is Google’s way of determining the significance of your site based on its inbound links. If you’re using Firefox, the Live PageRank add-on is a great way to check up on your own site’s PageRank every time you visit. Once you’ve developed some PageRank authority, you can spread this SEO “juice” through the rest of your site using internal linking, which we will discuss more in an upcoming post.
4. Conversion Rates - it’s lovely if people are coming to your site as visitors and leaving after they get the information they need. However, if you’re offering this information without a means of capturing their data, the visit is of no use to you. If the pages of your site that come up in certain search results are relevant to that search term, you should have no problem converting site visitors into prospects. Using Google Analytics, you are able to set up goals, such as a form conversion, to measure the actions taken by visitors when arriving at your site. For example, if someone is searching for “SEO white paper” and they arrive at a landing page on your site that offers such an article, it should be a very easy process for he/she to fill out a quick form and for you in turn to capture his/her prospect data. Measuring conversion rates is key to assess the value of your current content.

These are just a few KPIs that every organization looking to track SEO efforts should keep in mind. Staying on top of your data is key and we recommend that you take a look at other goals specific to your organization to develop more specific KPIs.