Measuring your SEO success and determining ROI isn’t as hard as most site owners think it is. But where many site owners run into trouble is they start siloing their analytics reports and picking data apart so much they can no longer see the big picture. Your SEO might be working great, but if you silo your successes you’ll never see it!

Here are 5 things that site owners tend to do when measuring their SEO successes that actually silos their analytics and keeps them from seeing the whole picture:

1. Only Looking at Organic Visitors from a Short Keyword List

I’ve worked with several clients that had a short list of keywords they wanted to drive the majority of their traffic from. No matter how many other long tail keywords were sending traffic to their site, if these top 20 or so keywords weren’t sending more visitors each month their SEO campaign wasn’t working. While it’s fine to have a list of core keywords you want to do well for, you can’t look at those keywords alone to determine if your SEO is working, especially when those keywords are incredibly broad and therefore incredibly competitive (“software,” “insurance,” “mortgage,” etc). You need to look at your organic visitor data as a whole in order to truly measure your SEO success.

2. Thinking SEO has No Effect on Branded Searches

Most site owners don’t realize that SEO can have a positive impact on branded searches as well as non-branded. Think about it like this. If you are trying to call Comcast Customer Service what do you search for in Google? Something like “Comcast customer service phone number,” right? Well, if Comcast has optimized their site properly for branded searches your search query should pull up their customer service or Contact Us page. You don’t want to go to their homepage and you most certainly don’t want to accidentally call their sales number. You are using SEO to find a specific piece of branded information. That’s why sites need to be optimized for branded keywords, product names, model numbers and the like. Yes, your site should rank #1 for your own brand, but there could be so much content out there that focuses on your brand that spots 2-10 in the search results might not be yours. If you don’t optimize a page for branded terms you are leaving your brand more vulnerable to searchers finding content that perhaps wasn’t created (or approved) by you.

When measuring your SEO success, don’t assume that every branded keyword is a given win. Nor should you assume that there is no need to optimize for your brand!

3. Letting Conversion Rates Alone Dictate Which Keywords are Working

Let’s say you own a pet grooming company and you use your website to book appointments (your main conversion metric.) One way to measure your SEO success is to see which keywords are doing the best job at converting visitors as this will show you which keywords resonate the best with your target audience. However, looking at your keyword conversion rate alone might not tell you the whole picture. For example, let’s say “cat declawing” sent 200 visitors to your site last month and 12 of them scheduled an appointment. That’s a 6% conversion rate. Now let’s say that “poodle grooming experts” sent 19 visitors to your site last month and 3 of them converted. That’s over a 15% conversion rate. On paper, 15% looks a lot better than 6%, but you have to look at the whole picture! “Poodle grooming experts” might have a higher conversion rate but it sent far fewer people to your site than “cat declawing.” Remember, long tail keywords like “poodle grooming experts” typically send visitors that are much further along in their buying cycle, although you might get fewer visitors from them. That doesn’t mean they are any more or less valuable than a broader keyword that sends more visitors with a lower conversion rate, but that’s why you can’t silo your metrics!

4. Discounting the Value of Long Tail Keywords

As I just mentioned, long tail keywords might send fewer visitors to your site but they are usually much more targeted. I’ve worked with several site owners that feel like there is no value in the 5 or 10 visitors a long tail keyword might send, but those visitors have enormous potential! Imagine if you optimized your website for 20 new long tail keywords. Even if each of those keywords only sent 5 isitors each month that’s 100 new, organic visitors to your site each month that have never before interacted with your brand! Can your website really afford to ignore 100 potential new clients that are nearing the end of their buying cycle?

5. Not Taking Seasonality Into Account

One of the most common problems I see when site owners try to measure their SEO success is they forget to take seasonality into account. Every business is subject to some kind of seasonality, be it actually based on the seasons or not. For instance, a landscaping company should expect their traffic to drop substantially in the winter because no one is searching for their services! It doesn’t mean their SEO isn’t working it just means their business is experiencing the effects of seasonality. Another example; accountants are likely to see a huge spike in traffic in the weeks leading up to Tax Day, but that spike will pretty much disappear on April 16th. It’s just the nature of the business!

When measuring the effects and success of your SEO campaign, it is so important that you don’t silo your data and conclusions. Google Analytics is a fantastic tool and a great source of information; you can pull up just about any kind of report you can want. But it’s also very easy to lose the forest for the trees when it comes to data analysis. Don’t let yourself get so bogged down in the nitty-gritty details and numbers that you lose the forest for the trees.

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Nick Stamoulis is the President of Massachusetts SEO company Brick Marketing. With nearly 13 years of experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his SEO knowledge by writing for the Brick Marketing Blog, hosting all-day SEO workshops and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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