How to Quantify SEO performance with ClickTracks

By Michael Stebbins

What have you done to improve your search engine optimization? Is it paying off? All online marketers need to understand keyword performance, keyword ranking changes, and robot visibility. For those of you who are using ClickTracks Optimizer, Pro or Agency edition (6.1 or newer), you already have the ability to track your SEO results.

In this article I'll share some tips for using ClickTracks to measure your SEO success. Let's get started!

1. Before you do anything else, make sure you are working with your latest web data. If you're using a hosted edition of ClickTracks, synchronize with the server. If you're using a log-file edition of ClickTracks, import your latest log files.

2. Next, use the search report to find your keyword rankings. The search report lets you see which keyword/search engine combination is bringing you the most qualified visitors, where your most popular keywords rank on the major search engines, and how different types of visitors responded after entering your web site.

While it's interesting to note each keyword's volume, I also like to check Average Time on Site (ATOS) for top 50 keywords. First, I find the ATOS for the average visitor on the Site Overview report—typical values might be between 50-300 seconds.

Now we'll look at the Search report and select the keywords (or keyword phrases) that produce visitors that stay longer than the average visitor. These keywords are candidates for optimization.

In the example above, four keywords stand out as candidates for optimization. But note—this is just one of many ways to assign value to keywords—other measurements include things like conversion rates, page counts, and revenue. You can even segment your visitors into discrete groups and compare how each group performs. Personally, I find it useful to compare PPC to Natural search visitors by keyword. I'll touch on this later in the article.

3. Use the Robot report to spot which pages are indexed (or ignored) by search engine robots (Note: The Robot Report is only available in the log-file analysis editions of ClickTracks Optimizer and Pro--not the hosted editions). The Robot report also shows the frequency with which robots crawl your pages.

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If you see a page that's consistently getting skipped, you'll need to simplify the links pointing to that page so the bots can find it!

4. Use the Robot simulation view to see your site just as a search engine robot sees it.

Make sure that the Meta Description and Titles are correct for each page—these are very common places for typos to occur! Highlight and count the important keywords for each page to make sure your keyword density is where it needs to be. Also, make sure that the page title matches the content, ensuring that people get what they're expecting when they come to the site.

5. If you have your Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns imported, then you can compare the effectiveness of your natural search results and PPC campaigns to that of the average visitor. Use the Quick Label Wizard to create labels for natural search vs. pay per click by selecting 'tools > quick labels' and then clicking the button marked 'Traditional Search vs. PPC.'

Then use the average time on site graph (on the site overview report), or average time on page (part of the navigation report), to indicate the effectiveness of search listings for different types of visitors.

In this example, we can confirm that our pay-per-click campaigns are performing better than regular search, but not as well as the average visitor. The pattern indicates that it's time to check which natural search keywords are bringing visitors to this page, and then confirm that our page content satisfies the visitor expectation set by the listing.

Are these the only ways you can use ClickTracks to confirm the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts? No way—this is just a quick list. Want more? Be sure to check out The ClickTracks Way for more comprehensive documentation of ClickTracks' features and attend ClickTracks' Virtual Classroom series featuring free classes on online marketing best practices. Or, hire a ClickTracks professional service rep for a few hours to get you set up and optimizing in a flash.