What are your metrics telling you?
You hear marketing professionals talk about it like it’s going out of style, but what exactly is “SEO” or “SEM” and how do you even begin to see what kind of difference it is making for your business? These are two questions commonly asked by small business owners hoping to take full advantage of the latest marketing tools now known as search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). In this blog post, we will introduce 10 simple ways to calculate SEO and SEM metrics in order to gauge success within a small business’ campaign. But first, what is SEO?
According to SearchEngineLand.com, “SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users.”
Search engine marketing is closely related but often includes a financial commitment and a cost per click campaign. Which fit is best for your business, is directly dependent upon your goals as a small business owner.
So, you have created a strategy and have begun implementing your SEO or SEM plans, what now? As time goes by, metrics will be revealed and numbers will begin to become available to analyze. With thousands of metrics to choose from, it can be tough to determine which metrics to look at and how to make proper calculations. Here are 10 easy calculations for determining positive SEO or SEM online activity metrics.
1.) CPC – Cost Per Click (SEM)
To determine the cost per click, you multiple the cost of acquisition metric by the conversion rate metric.
2.) Conversion Rate – How many clicks are converted into sales, orders, new clients etc. (SEM)
To determine the conversion rate, you divide the cost per click metric by the cost of acquisition metric.
3.) CPA – Cost per Acquisition (SEM)
To determine the cost per acquisition, you divide the cost per click metric by the conversion rate metric.
4.) # of Conversions: (SEM)
To determine the number of conversions, you multiply the total clicks metric by the conversion rate metric.
5.) Average CPC (SEM)
To determine the average cost per click, you divide the total cost metric by the total clicks metric.
6.) ROI – Return on Investment (SEO)
To determine the return on investment, you divide the attributable revenue metric minus the campaign investment metric by the total campaign investment.
7.) Keyword Ranking (SEO)
To determine keyword rankings, you rank keyword results for each search engine manually according to click through rate.
8.) CTR – Click Through Rate (SEO)
To determine the click through rate, you divide the search volume metric by the actual volume metric.
9.) Search Engine Traffic to Site
To determine the traffic driven to your site from search engine, you divide the total site traffic metric by the organic search metric.
10.) Goal Conversion Rate
To determine your goal conversion rate, you divide the number of page visits metric by the number of metric goals reached.
The process of optimizing content for search engine optimization or search engine marketing can be confusing for even a seasoned marketing professional or small business owner. If you or anyone you know if looking to grown the small business or expand their knowledge of search engine optimization practices, we encourage you to contact Three Girls Media Inc., today.
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Photo Credit: SEOPlanter