Tweet

How to Guage SEO Efforts

Written by: Mark Brimm

Article Overview: Most sites should be employing some measure of an SEO effort to help capture and increase overall organic search visibility. Inevitably, this is a long-range process, and one that is best made a part of the ongoing marketing model for promoting your business. This article lays out the different manifestations that SEO can take as a working cog within that model and how best to view and allocate an SEO budget.

How to Guage SEO Efforts

You'd like to know how to incorporate powerful, real-world SEO into your marketing arsenal, but perhaps you don't have an approved, set budget for this purpose. Any budget that goes to SEO is typically outlined by neophyte Internet-inhabiting companies as either:

• A) "Experimental", meaning its value is somehow dubious, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary (really? You want to run up an eternal AdWords bill when SEO could create long-term, permanent seacrh visibility on the same top page of search results, AND on key AdSense-carrying industry information sites? really??).
• B) "Conditional", meaning that said SEO efforts (and thus team or consultant employed to this end) must "prove" the value in terms of ROI, despite however short-lived or inadequately funded the campaign may be (the old "if it doesn't produce end-goal results within about a month, it must be bunk or simply "not for us").

or finally

• C) "Something we can quickly learn by watching" (a beautifully attractive idea for any small company or entrepreneur, except for the unfortunate little reality that SEO is not a set and closed science that can be pieced together and memorized by rote, but rather a living, breathing, ever-evolving, ever-changing and rather comprehensive and holistic art, the ultimate value of which can be measured only in terms of the actual number of years of devotion top and success in that art by the practitioner or source of the SEO expertise within the interactive marketing team/company/function). It takes years to understand SEO well enough to actually practice it to great effect. Many years to do it with ease and anything near predictable results.

This next part hurts the ears of the hopelessly scientistic (yes it IS a word...) souls all over the net, but it bears eternal repetition. Let us now solemnly pause for a moment of silence for their pain in advance...

Okay, so now we're ready to administer the stinging medicine of saying that, while the measurement and other helpful tools of SEO are created with the aim of making results more predictable, SEO itself is a creative, intelligent and holistic human activity with far more in common with linguistics, philosophy, ethics and art than with anythign resembling science. The SEO tools can measure, but sorry, they simply they can't make the creative decisions and predictive adjustments that are crucial to every aspect of an SEO campaign. This comes in the wake of an ongoing (and rather minor) debate over whether or not SEO can be "automated". It seems that the very people arguing for the possibility of "automated SEO" have themselves very little to no actual experience with managing a successful SEO campaign at any point in their lives. Everyone is an expert on the internet, with or without proof, I suppose.

SEO is a holistic art and theory of creating value which can only be carried out to the fullest potential by a creative individual who can interpet, shape, adjust and improvise with the tools and raw materials at hand (content, brand, products, information). All value in SEO is derived from THAT process. This is the very definition of a craft or art. Craft and art demand in-depth familiarity via committed experience. SEO doesn't become a set of hard and fast, unchanging rules by which to shape a website for the next five years (though an expeirnced SEO could probably predict what will or won't be an issue in five years).

So how does one approach SEO without entering into confusing or over-costly territory? Trust demonstrated experience, trust demonstrable success stories, trust the metrics, trust your perception of the creativity of the SEO consultant or company you are looking at, but more importantly trust their track record. Do NOT trust blind fears based on rumors and non-credible informational sources. I repeatedly ask my clients not to trust my word, but to trust their own best sound judgment, and to feed that judgement verifiable, credible surface information on what SEO is and what SEO can and cannot do. I may be one of the best free sources of advertising for the For Dummies books on SEO, because I constantly recommend them to my clients as a precursor to starting their SEO campaigns. Why? Because 1) I have no business relationship with the For Dummies series, 2) they are simply great general sources of credible and somewhat accurate information on all things to do with SEO, and (we all love threes, don't we?), finally, 3) this is one of the simplest, fastest, least costly ways to become oriented to SEO principles and to thus judge the probably value or lack thereof of any particular tactics being employed by the first SEO consultant you hire. This is not to say that the For DUmmies books have all the best information or insights, but merely that they are probably the best place to look first into the more basic understanding of commonly-agreed-upon SEO principles.

Now, after having gotten yourself a very solid grasp of some basic and not so basic SEO ground principles, you're ready to look at what role SEO can feasibly and realistically play in conjunction to all the other necessary components of your overall marketing for your business and allocate appropriate budget accordingly. Thus, if your monthly income from your business is only $1000/mo, and you do NOT have the credit or money to throw at startup costs, do NOT spend over $100/mo on an SEO campaign at this time unless you're willing to wait 3-6 months for any improvement to become visible. When however your revenue will support $500 or more a month, go ahead and start at that level until your goals are met and the ceiling rises. Don't sign a contract if you're not raking in major revenue. Only sign a contract if the revenue is stable enough to support a failed SEO campaign--that's the only way to avoid regretting it later. Go month-to-month or as-needed if your budget is tentative in relation to current profits. Read the reports and ask for more of them. Ask for help with understanding and developing your in-house understanding of Analytics and the improvement of conversions. Demand to be included in the process during monthly feedback (did I mention that you should ask for a monthly feedback session?).

And one final piece of advice for companies with start-up budget or credit to burn but thin patience: do NOT stop your campaign just prior to achieving your goals if you are already close to your stated goals. Marketing moves in cycles (just as does SEO). Gauging SEO campaign success is not possible if you spend a lot of month over ten or so months, get to the top 5, only to pull away from the finish line as you approaching it. I've seen this happen first hand several times...the client has spent ten thousand or more, have achieved the lion-share of the distance, and then allows something small to get in the way of simply crossing the short distance to the finish line. Don't be a victim to that inner self-destructive urge. It's best to keep short-term emotions in check when making long-term business decisions about SEO. Quit when the money or credit is not there, come back where you left off when it is, until you complete your original goals or at least have modified those goals to something more realistic and useful for the new outlook. Then measure the efficacy in relation to what the new visiblity contributed to your overall marketing plan and other efforts in play. Evaluate the overall impact of SEO by the cost it took you to get there and the most liekly cost to maintain it (significantly fractional of a quick climb is a long-delayed, gradual and only slight falling in SERPs (ie., search engine results pages).

And now that you have achieved your goals? Now that you've put the other pieces on the chessboard and played your move for this round? Now that the cycle has been completed? NOW decide whether or not to continue on through another cycle or to shift gears, change tactics, etc. What is worse than spending too much on SEO that doesn't immediately (one could sometimes say, magically) improve your profits? Spending too little at the tail end of a very expensive and lengthy overall campaign! Hedge your funds into a consistent stream with realistic goals that get re-evaluated over time as you go. Get involved in monthly feedback and analysis sessions with your SEO consultant. Implement the other conversion improvements and product revisions that are prt of one marketing cyle and finish that cyle before moving on to the next.

In the end, your SEO consultant or account rep should be able to provide the means for you to understand what your campaign is doing, demonstrate the progress is coming in, and should also be determined on providing some focal point of efforts which would allow you to see the value in the short-term of what long-term efforts could do for you across the spectrum of your keyword list.

Without proper education on the basic principles of SEO on your own, and without the proper budgetary underpinnings and potential profit from engagement with an SEO strategy. it doesn't make any sense to plunge ahead with SEO. Chances are, even if everything is going right, you'll be too confused at some point to know or see that and will make unwise choices.

I recommend exploring the full value of the free tools available before moving on to more costly solutions. Many perfectly successful businesses use the free Google Analytics as their sole metrics tool, along with the other free tools available for measuring competition across the search spectrum, until they can fork over bigger bucks for more detailed functionality, and so can you. Be committed to learning more and more about how to measure the impact of current traffic and content and be just as adamant on causing that traffic and content to become more and more targeted and relevant to your product or service or mission (the conversion you want to see happen via your website in the first place).

Be smart about acknowledging the key measurements (or KPIs--Key Performance Indicators) of the campaign's overall cycle of impact and resist the urge to abruptly abandon a cycle in progress and assume the role of an SEO--unless you want to go into the industry AS an Search Engine Optimizer yourself for many years to come and forsake the business you were actually in.

An experienced money-lender knows how to evaluate your credit-worthiness. An experienced salesman knows how to sell the leads already in your company's hand. An experienced brochure or website designer knows how to design an incredibly useful and attractive, branding-forward piece of lasting brand collateral. An experienced AdWords campaign manager knows how to manage and improve your campaign's efficiency and lower lost while rasing reach. And an experienced SEO knows what is likely to help and what is likely to hurt your site's long-term and (short-term) organic search visibility, search-based leads and search engine branding efforts. Trust in demonstrated experience and verifiable kudos from authentic client success stories. Avoid gossipy SEO blog nonsense and competitive advertorial fluff purveyors. Avoid "cheap! cheap!" offshore (and onshore) SEO hacks. Avoid ignorance about what counts and what your goals really are.

Understanding what SEO is and can do is your job if you own the marketing function of your business and allocate the online marketing budgets for your business. SEO is not a mirage, it's not merely a theory or merely an experimental technique. SEO is over 17 years old now and is the sole reason most Internet sites that make money even can. Don't fall into the trap of overvaluing or undervaluing SEO. It has a role, a place, and can be leveraged intelligently just as any other form on online or offline marketing can.

Related Articles
  Miracles, life and business lessons make St. Patricks Day one of the most memorable yet.
  Grow Your Network With Everyone You Meet
  How to Achieve Consistency on the Sales Force
  Never Just Sit There or Stand There When It Comes To Your Marketing Efforts
  How Organized Are Your Marketing Plans?

Article Tags: budget, guaging seo efforts, marketing, promoting your business, search visibility



Related Forum Posts


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Steps For Starting A Small Business

How do you keep it together on a daily basis?

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.