The Key To Increasing Inquiries, Leads, Sales…

If you want to increase __________________ by ______% <5, 10, 30, 50, even 100%> then you need to pay close attention to this post.
There is one thing most site owners could do to increase results that they aren’t doing.    What is that one thing?  Split testing!

So, testing – that’s nothing new.  What’s the big deal?  The big deal is that most people overlook this and miss the opportunity to significantly improve their response rate.
Let’s look at an example: You run a PPC campaign on Google AdWords and you have one ad running. Let’s say you sell shoes, and here is the ad you were running.

Designer Shoes are Affordable
Women’s Designer Shoes
Big names, great prices

Now, let’s say your click through rate (number of people that click on your ad) is 4.2%.  You are happy, because that’s better than you’ve ever done before. What most people do is keep running with that ad.  What we want you to remember to do is Split Test.

All that means is create a second version of your ad, to compete against your first version and see which one wins.  So, now look at version 2:

Designer Shoes are Affordable
Lady’s Designer Shoes
Big names, great prices

Do you see the difference?  Only one word (more about that in a minute).  In the first ad we have Women’s Designer Shoes and in the second ad we have Lady’s Designer Shoes.

So, let’s look at the results.

Ad 1 – 4.2 click through rate
Ad 2 – 5.1 click through rate!

You just increased your response rate by 21.4%!  No extra costs, simply changing one word and getting an improved response.

Why did more people click on Lady’s than Women’s?  We don’t know, we may never know, but we also don’t care (well that’s not entirely true, if you can understand the reason why something performed better, you could learn from that for your next round of tests but for now, let’s just say the reason doesn’t matter….all we know is have now improved our click through rate!)

Now are we done?  Not even close.  Now we take Ad 2, and create another ad to split test against Ad 2.  You can constantly test 2 ads against each other and incrementally increase your response rates.
What can you test?  Anything and everything!  Test your ads, test headlines on your site, test your pricing, test colors.  Test, test, test.

There’s so much more about testing that I could go into, but we’ll have to save that for another
time.  For now, just remember these 2 important points…

1. Test EVERYTHING!

2. Only make one change in each test for accurate results.  If you were to change the headline and the middle text on Ad 2, you wouldn’t know which was the cause of the higher response.  So, take one thing at a time and test, test, test. (that is assuming you are doing A/B split tests – if you do multivariate testing you can test more than one thing but we’ll leave that for another day)
Here are a few other testing case studies:

• Girls versus Women in a dating ad increased response by 30%
• “Get Top Google Rankings” as a headline increased my leads (opt-ins) by 13% over “Get Top Rankings”
• A smaller header graphic on my landing page got me 7% more leads from that page than the larger version of the same header graphic.

You can see the power, if you keep testing and improving your results, you are going to like your new bottom line.

Does every test produce huge results?  No!  But if you keep testing, then you’ll find over time the incremental improvements add up.

The bigger and more drastic the thing you test the more likely you’ll see a bigger improvement.  But it’s also more likely the test could bomb (and real marketers love it when tests bomb, it gives them data for going forward).  So make sure you monitor your test results – if you see something bombing you can halt it and revert back to the control only (the original version) until you come up with your next test.

So hopefully you understand the power of testing.  Now let’s talk about how you go about it.
Start by brainstorming a list of things to test (it could literally be anything – here are just a few ideas).

• Background color
• Header graphic versus no header graphic
• Large header graphic versus small header graphic
• Price
• Headline text
• Opt-in box graphics
• Picture of a man versus a woman
• Anything else you can imagine

Even font color and font face have impacted my results!
Once you know where you are going to start, build 2 versions of your page, the original or control being your page as it exists now and the B version will have the one thing you are split testing.  Once you are done, upload both pages to your server (if you can’t work within HTML or a site tool, have your webmaster do this step for you)

I suggest you use Google’s free testing tool (it allows multivariate testing as well as A/B split testing).  It’s a great tool, it’s free and it’s easy to use.  You can create an account here:

www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Once you login you click to start a new experiment.

Give the experiment a name – name it something meaningful and I also find it helpful to use the date, so I may call one test “AdB-Headline-November17” – AdB is the source of traffic for this page, Headline is what I am testing and the date is the date I started the test.

Then you paste in the URL for the control (remember this is your original page)
Next you paste in the URL for the test page.

Lastly you page in your “conversion page” – this is the page people will land on after they take the action you wanted them to on the above page (so it may be a thanks for ordering, or a thanks for opting-in page).
The Google tool will verify that the pages are live on line and then you click to the next step.  Here you tell the tool if you want to add the java script code that is needed to the page yourself or if you want your webmaster to do it for you.  If you choose to it, it will provide the code and the instructions.  If you want your webmaster to do it, Google will put all the data on to a page and give you a link to send to your webmaster to do.  You can check the status from within Website Optimizer and see when it’s been added to the pages.
You can then validate the pages to be sure that the code is added correctly to the site.
Then you click to start the experiment.

As I mentioned, you should monitor the results.  The tool will analyze the data and tell you when there is a winner.  And then you can turn that experiment off and start a new one.  You should always be testing the latest winner against a new idea and always be improving your results.

You can split test pages on your site, you can split test ads, email subject lines, landing pages for specific ad campaigns and more.

Get testing and be sure to share your results and feedback below!  We can all learn from people’s tests.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

12 Tips For Using Twitter to Grow Your Business

1. Monitor Your Name and Brand

Use the search feature to find out who’s talking about you and your products.

• If someone tweets something nice about your company, thank them. If it’s really good, ask if you can use their tweet as a testimonial on your site.
• When someone tweets something nasty about you, apologize publicly, fix the screw up and let them know it’s fixed. If they’re happy with how you handled the situation, ask them if they don’t mind sharing the good news on Twitter. Remember: it’s not just about that one customer; everybody else is watching you.

2. Grow Your Network

These are my three favorite ways to grow a Twitter followers base:

• Follow people talking about a keyword related to your market. They’ll follow you back. Un-follow those who don’t. I use FlashTweet for this.
• Find the authorities in your market and follow the people following them. They’ll follow you back. Un-follow those who don’t. Again, I use FlashTweet for this.
• Use Twitter directories such as Twellow and WeFollow to find people in your market.

But remember, it’s about quality, not quantity. I’d rather have 500 great followers than 5,000 good ones.

3. Invite People to Follow You

Include your Twitter link on your site, blog, email signature, and business cards. The more people who see your link, the more followers you’ll get.

4. Balance Following/Followers

If you follow a lot people and very few people follow you, you’ll be seen as a spammer. If a lot of people follow you and you don’t follow them back, it’s not very nice of you. Use FlashTweet or FriendOrFollowto balance your ratio.

5. Re-Tweeting

Re-tweeting is the equivalent of email forwarding. Teach your followers what re-tweeting is and ask them to re-tweet your tweets. This will result in your tweets spreading to their followers, who then may follow you as well. When someone else tweets about something you find interesting, re-tweet it so your followers can benefit from it too. Plus, when you re-tweet other people’s content, they notice you and want to learn who you are.

6. Respond to Messages

Click on your Twitter ID to see who’s talking to or about you.

7. Avoid Direct Messages

It’s OK to send some DMs once in a while, but a lot of spammers DM people all the time, so use these with caution.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com

8 Ways to Optimize Your AdWords Campaign

You may have noticed that Google makes it easy to set up an AdWords campaign, but not so easy to get a return on your investment in pay-per-click. There are a lot of levers you can pull in your AdWords campaign to influence results. Here are eight ways to optimize your AdWords campaign for better ROI.

1. Know your target audience profile

Knowing your target audience, in the context of Google AdWords, goes beyond maintaining a list of demographic parameters that describe the identity of your customers. You also need to keep in mind one important question – how is my audience using Google? Trying to get a feel for their behavioral patterns and letting that behavior inform your selection and use of keywords will give your AdWords campaign an edge over your competition.


2. Speak the language of your audience, not your own
Keep in mind that your target audience may or may not use the same vocabulary that you do to describe what you sell. Your keywords should reflect the way they talk about your offerings, not the way you do.


3. Select primary and secondary keywords
Each keyword in your campaign has a cost that depends on how many others are bidding on it. Your primary keywords are directly related to your product/service. In case of highly competitive products, your primary keywords may prove to be quite expensive. It’s equally important to choose secondary keywords that are not directly related to your product. Secondary keywords widen your reach and can bring down your pay-per-click advertising costs if you choose less competitive segments.
 
4. Select smart site placements
Apart from bidding on keywords, AdWords also gives you access to a wide range of partner websites where your ad can appear. You can choose categories of websites that your target customers are most likely to visit. For example, if you sell digital cameras, you can advertise on photography sites or sites that target gadget-lovers.


5. Use long-tail keywords for high conversions at lower cost
Online users are gradually using longer key phrases rather than keywords. These longer phrases have lower search volume than common keywords. However, long-tail keywords increase your chances of clicks and conversions since they are very specific. For instance, “digital camera” is a generic keyword. A long tail alternative would be “best deal for Canon 1000D.” If you’re struggling to find relevant longer tail keywords, there are a number of free keyword tools that can help you discover profitable, traffic-driving terms.


6. Monitor conversions, not just clicks
While you pay for clicks, tracking overall conversions from each keyword can help you derive better value out of your campaign. This, however, requires good integration of Google Analytics and AdWords with your CRM and sales management system.


7. Optimize your ad copy
Just like headlines play an important role in a traditional media campaign, having highly contextual ad copy that’s closely related to the keyword being searched for plays a vital role in conversions. An ad for a broad term like “digital camera” might lead to information that would aid the purchase decision of the buyer. However, if the search term indicates intention to buy, the copy should be persuasive and lead the user to a landing page with an option to purchase.


8. Test your landing page designs
The key to continually increasing ROI from Internet marketing is testing. Beyond testing multiple versions of your ads, make sure to test variations on your landing pages. Google offers the Google Website Optimizer tool that can help you decide the best layout for your landing page. Decisions like where to place the “Buy Now” button and what color to make it may be aided by this tool.

Why You Must Look Beyond Google Adwords Click Through Rate Concept

n Google adwords advertising space, click through rate also known as “CTC” is a familiar term. It is the mathematical end result of a situated ad campaign number of impressions divided by the number of clicks acquired at a particular point in time. Google uses this mathematical denotation to measure the relevance of a given ad and accords the ad with some credit reward proportional to the positive or negative outcome of the end result.


One such credit reward is a rise or fall on quality score “QS” Quality score is tied tightly to the apron of click through rate. If an Ad click through rating is high, then there will be a correspondence rise in quality score and if the opposite is the case, it will respond accordingly – thus click through rate and quality score are twin sister metric, dancing on the same wavelength.


The overall benefit of these two metrics to the advertiser is a sharp reduction in bid price and a favorable ad position. This is assuming your quality score level, occasioned by click through rate is on the positive side. This is the chain reaction concept that drives Google adwords program. Rewards for an advertiser’s effort in creating a quality ad that satisfies the aspirations of human visitors and keep them coming back to the program.

Is Click Through Rate Concept a Catch – 22 Or a Greek Gift?

Depending on what side of the spectrum one is, the truth of the matter is that click through rate concept has never been fully explained. When Mr. Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google explained The Concept Behind CTR and Quality Score, there were two things that he did not reveal to his stupefied audience. One: that click through rate does not equal conversion rate. Two: that whether your clicks convert or not, Google is better for it.


The real argument here is not whether we need clicks to sustain our campaign. Of course we do need quality clicks – lots of it at that. But when your campaign starts acquiring clicks at an astronomical rate for the wrong reasons other than conversions, then your days in the game of adwords marketing program are numbered. Perhaps that explains why Google in its infinite wisdom thought ahead of time and introduced the Click Through Rate Concept as a cushioning effect to prolong your dying day in the game. Lose money fast or slowly, you are dying anyway.

How Do We Move Beyond Google’s Jingoism of Losing Money Slowly?

Google adwords is superb and undisputedly the quickest and most widely used online advertising media to showcase your brand and connect with your perceived customers right on the fly. The key to success in this ubiquitous marketing media is buried deep inside of your Keyword phrase.  In fact, if there was to be an alternative name to adwords marketing, it would have been “Keyword Marketing” because your customers must first use some sort of keyword phrase before able to connect to your product.


If you understand the dynamics of keywords, then your adwords campaign will be driven by conversion rate. Most adwords advertisers craft their campaigns around click through rate with the hope of gaining favor from Google thereby saving cost. But Google is wiser because they know that their adwords program is not a place to save money. Whereas Click through rate concept enables you to minimize cost and maximize lost, keyword dynamic concept enables you to minimize cost and maximize profit.  Now, lets take a close look at two hypothetical keywords – “Swiss Wrist watch” and “Maverick I I Titanium” What you will quickly detect from these two keyword is that whereas one is inquisitive and defined to a specific brand, the other is just a wild card without any commercial intention.


If a searcher uses the keyword “Maverick I I Titanium” which also is a family of the Swiss wrist watch to find your ad defined specially for it, the probability of closing a sale is as good as done. The dynamic force behind this high probability is that the searcher already knew that there are so many brands of Swiss wrist Watches but has taken his pain to narrow down and settles for a particular brand.


Again, if you were to deploy these two keywords in adwords campaign, the bid cost of “Maverick I I Titanium” will be next to nothing while you will have to fret and tweak forever before you can strike a balance with keyword “Swiss Wrist watch” The reason is that Google already assumed that “Swiss Wrist watch” is an important keyword because it has a huge volume search despite no transactional relevance while  “Maverick I I Titanium” which has high probability of sale conversion but with low volume search has no relevance in the eyes of Google.


In Summary therefore, it is pertinent to realize from the onset that conversion driven adwords campaign occasioned by highly targeted and defined keyword phrase is the magic wand that brings success in adwords marketing and not the click through rate concept.

10 Things from 2010 that May Shape Your 2011

A compendium of random stats I’ve found interesting from 2010

It’s that time of year again, where people are in full swing of 2011 planning so I thought what better time to share a few of the takeaways from 2010 news and views that may well rock your 2011 world.

I normally write a more typical search business column, but this time around as I’ve been in 2010 review and 2011 planning mode recently, I thought I’d pull together a quick and random compendium of industry-level tid bits that give those trend munchers and stat lovers their daily fix.

So for instance, did you know that Internet World Stats states that of the 82.5% internet penetration in the UK – almost a 3% increase in a year?!   Bigger than that for ecommerce though is that a touch over 67% of the UK population is now thought to be persistent buying goods online.  Anyway, with such a great deal of this growth being driven by social, let’s kick things off there shall we…

Social Consumption

The consumption of social media is on the rise, we all know that, but did you know it now dominates 25% of time spent online according to Nielsen?

Interestingly, Hitwise suggests 13% growth in retailer’s traffic from social media year on year highlighting the importance of word-of-mouth and the optimisation of search and social media assets with such purpose.

Increasing monetisation of social media such as Twitter is also an area to keep an eye on, knowing the interest of clients in this area.

Businesses need to be aware of how forms of social media communication are informing business communications too…

The Bingoo Search Alliance

The Yabinghoo search alliance will deliver an aggregated 154 searchers in the USA alone!  The UK will not see anywhere near this sort of scale of searching with less than 6.5% market share of search volume being seen consistently across 2010 – even with Bing’s above-the-line presence…

Beyond Bing powering Yahoo’s search results and Site Explorer changes, there is little more that can affect SEOs in the UK but it’s more apparent changes are likely to be seen across PPC.  Regardless, it’s certainly one to watch – maybe two search minds will be better than one…?

Real-time, social Google and personalisation

It’s not too clear how Google is going to be pulling more real time functionality in to its search result, but it’s very likely.  Eric Schmidt has already admitted to adding more social media layers to its search results as opposed to all out social media platform creation and promotion – focussing mostly on search quality through social personalisation.  An example of Bing doing something similar can be seen in the strategic partnership with Facebook.

Mobile Search

The increasing impact and growth of smart phones is naturally hugely important for those online marketers that work with mobile search, and a 96% growth in smartphone purchases isn’t to be smirked at.  And with Google absolutely kicking competitor’s proverbial behinds at mobile search (with an incredible 98%) it gives us good cause to watch that little bit of digital space flourish over the coming months and years. The UK is leading the adoption of mobile search with 70% growth.

Growth of mobile search is at such a rate, than retailers are believed to be struggling to keep up!

Interestingly too, the mobile app economy, is in part, being driven in part by word-of-mouth – at almost 40% – reminding us of the importance of conversation driving so much demand online.

Online Video

More increase is seen across video too, with ComScore reporting a 37% increase year on year.  And with YouTube holding a dominant share in visibility can we safely say that we’ll see this continue into 2011?

And with UKOM/Nielsen reporting that of the 17.4m users in May, the average time spent on the site over month was 53 minutes, or 1 hour in the USA – far short of the 7 hours on Facebook:

Increasing Infiltration of The Google

With the ever growing reach of Google through the Google OS and Google TV are we going to see Google extend its advertising reach beyond more traditional forms of search?  Google quite clearly is working towards dominating those channels that influence such a large part of our media consumption.

Advertising

It’s great to see the online advertising sector performing so well as transparent return on investment and increasing time being spent on online properties.

The growth in display year-on-year is in part recovery but also due to an increasing sophistication, now seeing 34% growth since 2009 forQ3 – with Facebook drawing the most impressions of course.

Content paywalls

You could quite easily regard the decision of The Times and The Sunday Times to put up a paywall around their content as a flop, but maybe they are the trail blazers in attributing value to content.  For me it’s not a business model that is working well for them in the short-term but who knows what the world wide web’s trends and New International have in store to make or break this idea.

Maturing SEO Tools

Highlighting a few tools isn’t a logical step in this post but I just wanted to do it in order to give a nod to those companies where there have been such impressive steps in their maturity.  Increasing investment in tools that act as a window to indicative / sample data should be encouraged, so here’s a hat tip to Majestic SEO, Linkscape, Eight Fold Logic, SEM Rush and Dart Natural Search.

Economic Buoyancy

We’re in turbulent economic times, so keeping an eye on economic news might help you to feel more at easemacro level and search industry level are shaping up. with how things at a

Online as a research tool – the finance sector is often used as a benchmark for economic activity and with an estimated 10 million UK consumers seeking financial services / products online, with 15 minutes on average being spent on each site – a huge feat!

The Wrap Up

I think this just about does it.   In all honesty this list is kind of endless, but hopefully it reminds you of a couple of developments in the industry and how things are shaping up for 2011.

I’d be interested to hear what’s high on your agenda from 2010 moving in to 2011, so please feel free to share…!

9 Sure-Fire SEO Tips

1) Steal Your Competitors’ Keywords

• Look at the keywords they use in their title tags.
• Look at the keywords they use to link to their “money pages”.
• Some webmasters are dumb enough to include their money keywords in their meta keywords tags. Take a look at these but keep in mind that smart SEO people won’t do this. In fact, just to mess with wannabe SEO’s  they might actually put bad keywords in the meta keywords tags to get others to use them.

If stealing keywords sounds shady, its only because I used the word “steal”  instead of “learn” to grab your attention. You should always learn about your competitors; you can bet that they’ll try to steal..err learn your keywords too.

2) Fix Canonical URL Issues

If you can access your site by typing “site.com” and “www.site.com”, Google will see that as two different sites with the exact same content and that can hurt you a lot. To fix this create a file called .htaccess with these three lines and put it in the root folder of your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.site\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

WARNING: unless you know what you’re doing, have someone else do this. All servers are configured differently and you don’t want to screw-up your .htaccess file.

3) Pay Attention to Your MozRank

SEOmoz has a tool called LinkScape that calculates your MozRank. MozRank is a great metric that evaluates the QUALITY of your incoming links. (Most link assessment tools only focus on quantity). If you have more links than your competitors but they’re ranking above you, you should compare your MozRank to theirs; maybe your competitor has fewer links but they are BETTER than yours.
If your MozRank is higher, you have more links than them, and they still rank above you, then you probably have an issue with the lack of keywords in the anchor texts of your incoming links.

4) Get a Double Listing

A double listing (or indented listing) can sky-rocket your click-through-rate (CTR)! How you can get a double listing?

• You need two pages of your site on the same page of Google results. For example, let’s say you have a page A and page B. Page A ranks #4 on Google for “plant seeds” and Page B ranks #15 for the same keyword.
  • You need to take page B from position 15 (second page of Google) to position 10 (first page of Google) so pages A and B are on the first page of Google.
• Perform this Google search to find out what 2 pages Google finds most relevant to a given keyword: site:yoursite.com [keyword].
• Now that you know what 2 pages are the most relevant for that keyword, use the SEO Rank Checker Tool to find out the Google rankings for those pages.
• Optimize pages A and B for your keyword. Link to page B from page A and vice versa using the keyword you want to rank for in the anchor text of the links.
• Get some keyword-rich links from external sites to pages A and B.
• Presto! Your listing will look like this one:

5) Use Google Webmaster Tools

You really have no excuse not to use this amazing tool. These are some of the things your can do with it:

• Submit a sitemap of your site so Google knows what pages they should index.
• Tell Google what is the canonical URL you want to use (site.com or www.site.com).
• Detect issues with duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.
• See a list of URLs restricted by robots.txt.
• Detect crawlability issues.
• Find 404 error pages.
• See the most common keywords people find your site through.
• Get a list of links pointing to your site.
• Tell Google how they should index your images.

6) Create a Google Sitemap

Now that you’re using Google Webmaster, create a sitemap using this tool: GSiteCrawler.

7) Use Google to Get Keyword Suggestions

Start typing your main keyword in the Google search box and get ideas for keywords. For a more detailed keyword research use the Google Keyword Tool.

8) Learn the 4 Truths about the QUALITY of Links

• Links from authority sites (e.g. CNN) are worth more than links from average sites (e.g. your nephews’ videogame blog).
• Links from related sites are worth more than links from unrelated sites.
• Links with your keyword in the anchor text are worth more that links that say “click here” or “read more”.
• Link QUALITY is way more important than link QUANTITY.

9) What To Do If You Ever Get Penalized By Google

First off, avoid spammy black-hat tactics so this never happens. But, if you’ve been a bad boy/girl, this is what you should do:

• Find out why it happened. Read Google Webmaster Guidelines and find out what you’ve done wrong.
• Fix it.
• Ask Google to reconsider your site. Admit to everything and don’t pretend you didn’t know what you were doing. Promise that you won’t do it again.
• Don’t do it again!

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com

The Google Analytics Metrics That Help You To Monitor The SEO Progress And Also Calculate The ROI

Google Analytics cannot be ignored by any SEO or for that matter any web marketing professional. Google introduces this application which is offered for free by Google as –

“ Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. “
FYI: The Google Analytics can be accessed here. The analytics product tour video can be viewed here.

If you register and view the data metrics offered you will see that there is a comprehensive portfolio giving you the details about how the visitor reached your web page and what content was viewed and also the client side data which can help you judge what kind of impression your site must have made on the visitor. It also allows you to download the data as an excel sheet or in a PDF format and mail it to the client or create logins so the client can view the data at its own convenient time and his own curiosity level. With Google Analytics data SEO’s can manage to calculate the ROI which can be found reliable by the client as Google enjoys a very high trust factor when it comes to search and search products.

But when you have a lot of data available it is quite possible that one can get confused and lose focus from the purpose of tracking the site. There can be many reasons for tracking the data but let us see from the SEO perspective which metrics should be monitored  daily, weekly, or monthly to keep an eye on where the site is heading to on the web.

I tend to focus on the following metrics, assuming I want to keep atrack of the visits from search engines and the especially visits from Google.

Month

Visits

New Visits

Visits From Search Engines

Visits From Google

Bounce Rate

If you maintain this data month-wise, you get an idea about the improvement or the results achieved as a result of SEO done on the site.

Another important report to be maintained is the no. of keywords with which the site is ranking and the source (you can select the source as Google and get an idea with how many and which keywords the site is ranking on Google and how many visitors are reaching your site via this source and how many pages are being viewed by them)

Let us take the above metrics in detail:

• Visits: This is the total no. of visits for that month . This will give you an idea of increase or decrease in the no. of visits from all sources.
• New Visits: The no. of new visits to your site . New visit means the visitor who is viewing your site for the first time. There is an exception and an approximation in this metric as the GA uses a javascript to track the visitor behavior and uses cookies for that , a visitor who may have visited your site earlier but has deleted the cookies and views your site after that then that same visitor is considered as a new visit though actually it is an old or a repeat visit. So, this data has to taken keeping an approximation in mind.
• Visits From Search Engines: This gives you the data of how many visits the site has got from all the search engines. This can be filtered more to view the no. of visits from each search engine.
• Visits From Google: After you filter the data from the ( total visits) to (visits from search engines) to (visits from Google) you can track and monitor the increase or decrease from this source and hence measure the success of the SEO campaign on Google.
• Bounce Rate: This again is an important factor which may not exactly give you an idea about the progress of the SEO on the site but it will surely give you an idea about how many people are finding the landing page interesting enough to view other pages of the website for more information about your company. The Bounce Rate tells you about the no. of visitors who went back from the landing page itself and did not view any other page. This data is in percentage form.

When you maintain this table month-wise it gives you have a clear idea about the SEO performance of the site and you can confidently discuss the details with the client with adequate proof over a period of time and also gear the SEO campaign and tweak the website according to the data available to you.

The above table gives you a quantifying data but the quality of the SEO campaign will be judged by the keywords with which the site is ranking and the increase in the no. of targeted keywords , long tails keywords and others on the search engines and you can again segregate all this to present the keyword and source details winning the confidence of the client further by presenting it in the following table:

Source

Keyword

Visits

Pages/Visit

Avg. Time on Site

% New Visits

Bounce Rate

Data thus monitored periodically will give details about the site from the search engine and SEO perspective and hence will offer clarity, conciseness and confidence about the ROI calculated.

A simplest ROI calculation would be attained by answering these following questions:

• How many visits received from search engines? Let us denote this as – a
• How many enquiries received via the website form or calls received from visitors after visiting the site which they found via search engines? Let us denote this as - b
• The no of enquiries thus received got converted to sales? Let us denote this as – c
• The amount of profit from these invoices drawn? Let us denote this as – d
• The cost of SEO monthly / annually depends on what basis you are calculating ? Let us denote this as – e

I suggest the ROI to be calculated half yearly or annually as this gives a clear idea.
Hence , (assuming you keep the period of the calculation the same for all the metrics)

ROI = (d – e) / e * 100

Basically,

ROI = ( Annual Profit from the sales which were achieved via the Enquires from search engines – The annual cost of SEO for the website) divide upon (The annual cost of SEO for the website) multiplied by 100

There can be many permutations and combinations that can be worked out in order to get various performance data as per your requirement. For example if you want to measure the conversion ratio of your sales department keeping in mind the online enquiries received then it can be done as follows:

Conversion Ratio = c/ b * 100

This can become as a KPP (Key Performance Parameter) for your sales team which can be monitored on a periodic basis to have a direction and guidance for chalking out the sales plans for the next period with a targeted approach and also the reasons for the low or high ratio can be discussed and therby helping to find the strengths and weaknesses in the system .

All these calculations are very simple but the recording of data about the no. of online enquiries generated and thereby the sales achieved has to be done from the client side and the data has to be given to the SEO so that a targeted report can be prepared and offered to the client for reference and to go ahead without doubts and ifs and buts.

Half the data comes from Google analytics for which the login can be created for the client to view and monitor by themselves and the other half has to be given by the client himself . So, if the client or his team is competent enough to calculate the ratios themselves then the onus is also on them else they have to cooperate with the SEO to offer the data so all these calculations are possible as only this guided approach can give the SEO the sense of satisfaction and the client the idea of the online progress of his website due to SEO.
Eventually, all analytics is has to be taken with an element of approximation but the overview of all this data monitored, recorded and filtered accordingly for the purpose surely shows us the road ahead and helps us to tap the online market with confidence and assuredness.