Is it working?
After spending time and money on an SEO campaign, you need to know how it’s working for you. If you’re a client of ours, we can easily tell you how your rankings are doing in the search engines and lots more.
But that’s only a small part of it. The real measure of SEO success is in whether you’re getting more customers and increased revenue.
You really need to track conversions: phone calls, information requests, and sales. Your SEO consultant typically can’t do that for you — you need to track that stuff yourself.
Example
John O’Connor, owner of Shade Tree Garage in Morristown, NJ, a client of ours, maintains a yellow legal pad at his appointment desk. Every new caller gets added to a list on that pad, and they’re asked “How did you learn about us?”. That gives him a very clear idea of how his Yellow Pages ad is doing, how successful his newspaper advertising is, and how well his SEO campaign is doing.
[Update note: Note that this was written in 2009 when people still used the Yellow Pages. That’s now online.]By the way, John reports that he’s getting one new paying customer a day from online searches as a result of his SEO.