We measure how we’re doing in SEO by looking at the traffic from the search engines, obviously. If we’re smart, we take into account the number of relevant searches, which can change temporarily or gradually over time. And if we have enough traffic, we can break things down to search term level, and see how different terms are performing.
However, one thing we simply must do in our analysis is to separate out the search terms which are related to our business name and products from the general ones. Too many search engine traffic reports lump everything in together and are therefore really only a measure of the number of visits from searches on the company name or brands. As the clickthrough rate on the company result in these searches is likely to be consistent and huge, the measure is really just that of the number of searches for the company name or brands. Not what we want.
A proper analysis of SEO effectiveness, based on actual search engine traffic, should be separating search terms which are related to our business name and products from the more general searches. These are the ones we need to be working on, but as we’re not going to do as well with them, it takes courage to highlight them on their own.