Thinking about taking on outside help to do Search Engine Optimisation? If that’s the case, it’ll be essential to set up some performance indicators.
SEO should not be an end in itself, but should align with what the business needs. That need doesn’t have to be “sell more stuff”. It could easily be something like “reaching more overseas customers”. So the first step is to work out what’s needed, and what aspect of improving the website’s performance in the search engines will achieve these aims. Read around the subject, but this is a good start.
Now it’s time to work out what needs to be measured, and over what period. While metrics such as rankings can be tracked on a weekly basis, but enquiries and sales should be tracked on a longer basis, as well as compared to equivalent periods.
This excellent article suggests all of these examples of SEO KPIs:
- SEO keywords
- SEO metrics
- Real-world SEO KPIs
- Conversion KPIs
- Engagement KPIs
- Referral traffic
- Brand impact
- Link building KPIs
- Soft conversion KPIs
- Business objective-specific KPIs
There’s a lot of good advice online about choosing someone to take on the SEO task, but How to write the perfect SEO brief for an SEO agency is a good start.