By John Eberhard
The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve where your site ranks on search engines for the keyword phrases you are targeting. Thus leading to better rankings, increased site traffic, and more leads and sales.
Many SEO consultants talk only about keywords and search engine rankings. While that is important, most business owners don’t really care about keywords and search engine rankings. Most of the time they just want to get more leads and more sales. And to make their business grow.
So the front line of tracking the results of SEO needs to be increasing leads and sales. And effective SEO should be increasing leads and new sales coming into the business. So how do you track that?
First of all, you need to set up the website so it converts, meaning people contact you to inquire about products or services. It has to have prominent phone numbers and response forms.
It is best to set up the site with a trackable phone number using a service like callrail.com. That way each phone call from the site is tracked, then it automatically bounces over to the company’s main phone number. Then all response forms on the site need to send to the client but also to the SEO consultant so the responses can be accurately tracked. It is also important to remove email links on the site (called naked emails), because if people respond by sending to that email, the SEO consultant won’t be able to track that.
Now if you work out the average sale for the company, and figure out what percentage of leads coming in are closed, you can then determine the dollar value of a new lead.
Then you take the average number of leads that were coming in monthly prior to work began on SEO. That is your baseline.
So for any increase in the monthly number of leads, you can estimate the increase in revenue for the company based on the increase in leads over the baseline amount. This is of course where the rubber really meets the road – increased revenue – which is what any business owner wants. But in order to really determine that, you have to have your tracking mechanisms set up and working flawlessly.
Beyond tracking leads and sales, it is also good to track search engine rankings for the keywords the company is targeting, and site traffic. This allows you to see the progress being made over time. With effective SEO, these should be rising over time.
If you want to increase leads and revenue for your business, contact us at 661-441-2429, or fill out a form here.
