How Do You Know If Your SEO Campaign Has Been a Success?

 When you begin an SEO campaign, be it with an SEO consultancy or even on your own, you should always begin by asking yourself a question, what do I want to get from the campaign? This is the only way that you will be able to judge how successful it has been at the end or at anytime during the life of the campaign, so it is pretty vital if you want to know if your methods are working or if your money has been well spent.

There are many different measures that you can base your success on, but this all depends on your initial goal or goals, as if you do not work out what you want to achieve, how can you possibly know when you have achieved it? You also need to work out in the early days what your focus is going to be on. Is it going to be on generally improving the SEO of the whole site, or are you going to just focus on particular areas, strengthen them and then move onto other areas on the next campaign.

As mentioned, there are many ways to measure your success, but you need to work out why you are embarking on your SEO journey, and some of the major reasons are listed below -

Increase Sales - Some may say this is why anyone, business or organisation uses an SEO campaign, and few would disagree. If you are a business, you want more sales, and therefore you will probably judge your SEO campaigns success on how many extra sales you have achieved. Sometimes this is not realistic, as even the best SEO campaign in the world might not lead to more sales, as it could well be the price, product or something else that stops the visitor purchasing.

Increase Traffic - An increase in traffic is what any SEO consultancy wants to achieve, but its important that it's good traffic, and by this, we mean it is traffic that is looking for what you are offering. Any company can double its traffic, but if these people are not your kind of visitor, then an increase in traffic is not necessarily a good benchmark of a decent SEO campaign. We would rather send ten related visitors to our clients, than 100 non related, even though it might look better on a graph!

Extra Exposure - If you are a new company, you will sometimes use an SEO campaign to gain exposure, by the use of press releases, article submissions, link building and social bookmarking. Some of our clients simply want us to get their name out on the internet rather than build X amount of traffic, so this can be another way to measure your success.

Increase Revenue - Along the same lines of sales, but for some companies they are just looking to increase general revenue, which might come from sales, advertising revenue and other passive incomes from the website. Again, measuring an SEO campaigns success can have its difficulties, but overall if your revenue increases, you are going to be pretty pleased.

Key Focus On One Area - We have clients who have asked for a 6 month SEO campaign to focus on the launch of a new product or the release of a new venture. Instead of concentrating on the whole site, they have specifically asked us to focus on just one area, which means that although the general SEO will improve at the same time, the main focus is to drive traffic and increase exposure for just one area.

So, as you can see, there are many different measurements when it comes to basing the success of your campaign, but it is vital you set out your goals before you set off on the sometimes rocky journey. Sometimes, you will want to achieve lots of things, sometimes only a couple, but know what you want to get out of your campaign is the only real way of knowing how well it really went, and what to do differently for next time.

Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO Web Optimisation and Web Design company serving the Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales.

He has worked in the SEO and Internet Marketing world for many years, and working in partnership with another company has launched the new SEO business.