If you’re into SEO, and you attend a any number of conventions that revolve around metrics, KPIs will almost undoubtedly come up at some point. Questions will be asked.
- What should I measure?
- How do I calculate ROI?
- How do I prove my value?
In the opinion of a number of SEOs, the answer will almost always come down to one thing – money.
It’s pretty easy to track our efforts through a menagerie of tools, such as analytics. Although not every single thing about your website can be tracked, we have the ability to track the majority of what we do online.
The biggest problem is that, regardless of what we can or can’t track, all of the work we’ve put into a site’s marketing, it doesn’t always translate into the most important thing – money. It can be really frustrating.
Sometimes, even if your site is getting more traffic than you ever wanted, but they aren’t converting, all that traffic doesn’t mean a thing. But there could always be reasons why they aren’t converting. You could have a slow site. The landing page that the visitor comes to may not be what they’re looking for. It could be that landing page hasn’t been optimized for that appropriate part of the buying cycle.
But there is usually more to the situation than that.
There is an article by Casie Gillette where we look at why we could be getting some decent traffic, but not enough sales. Casie offers up some suggestions on where we can find some answers. Check out her post on Search Engine Land by following the link below.
Search Engine Land: What To Do When Traffic Doesn’t Equal Sales