Tracking the progress of your efforts is a key step in the overall SEO process. Without it you're wandering in the wilderness. I will discuss the five most important data points hereafter,  but let me spend a few words on a pet peeve. We visit company after company where we are told that they have an SEO provider and they are ranking well and are happy with their current arrangement.  We do a quick analysis of their website SEO and it stinks. They are ranked 100th or worse on every possible keyword we can think of. When we press them they say "look we're number one."  The search term is their company name.  I always think to myself, "If I have to tell these folks why that is worthless, is there any hope that they can understand serious SEO?" Unscrupulous SEO companies have made an art out of creating reports that show clients ranking in the top three slots for 1their own name and 10-20 keyword terms - that unfortunately are virtually never searched. We see monthly statistical reports that do everything but quantify the real value of the SEO services that are being provided. If you can't quantify exactly what the SEO effort is adding to your bottom line, that's a problem. There is no other advertising medium where you can so exactly track ROI. Virtually everything can be tracked on your website.  If you’re not getting the data you need its not because it isn't available.

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We have an attorney that pays us $1000 per month and for that we've tripled his income. That's measurable. We have a client that pays us $12,000 per month, for which we increased internet leads-to-sales from 11 to 18 per month over a three month period and continue to increase lead production for his big ticket product. This client earned more than $500,000 last month on just the increase we produced for our $12,000 fee. Pretty darn quantifiable, isn't it? If your ROI isn't quite that obvious you need to dig into the analytics to make sure you are getting more hits, not just, better ranking on keywords. Don't get scammed by the guy that charges only $300 a month, produce squat, and tries to con you into thinking they are actually doing something.. Don't accept fuzzy numbers from your SEO provider. If you get a whole bunch of number that say everything is good and you're not seeing it where it counts, something’s very wrong. These scammers produce very little for most clients and eventually the client fires them and becomes leery of ever trying SEO again.

If an SEO company claims they will make you the super star of the web - you must "trust buy verify. Insist on good, useful analytics. In the end if you get reports that say everything is wonderful, but sales are not growing - well, that's the real number that matters.

So, here is what we provide our clients every month and you should insist on these at a minimum from any SEO provider:

First, we provide month over month history of unique visits broken down by source. That means we can tell you how many came to you by searching for your name, indentifying those that already knew you and so came from your efforts and not ours. We tell you how many came from all the various keywords so you can see what we're doing to help sales each month. Of course this helps us to understand which keywords are working so we can concentrate on tweaking those words for improvement.

Second, we provide keyword ranking with keywords listed with the most often searched keywords first, and we provide the number of searches actually done each month for each keyword. If we tell you your ranking number 1 on a particular keyword term you can see if it's significant or not.  Again, some SEO companies give a report of keywords that are ranking first page. This means nothing if you don't know the number of searches done each month for these keywords. If the term is searched 6000 times each month, ranking number one is a big deal. If you rank number 1 on twenty keywords that no one searches, you've got nothing.

Third, we provide conversion rates and bounce rates. Out of all the unique visitors, how many converted to filling out a form or calling. How long did they stay on the site? Which page most often precedes the conversion and which page has the highest bounce rate? In other words, which page is converting so we can put more focus on getting more visits there, and which page is running people off so we can fix it?

Fourth, we provide you with data as needed to determine which pages are bringing in which searches. This allows the client to prioritize messaging and promotions to the high traffic pages and products or services that are attracting the most attention.

Fifth, because every SEO program has some PPC to fill in the gaps, we provide a complete analysis of PPC spend to leads (conversions) on a keyword basis. This simply allows you to see that it is effective and efficient and that we are spending your money like it was ours.

In the final analysis it should be so obvious that the SEO is working as advertised that you don't even bother with the reports. You should see an immediate spike in sales when you first engage an SEO group, and you should continue to see the growth month after month. If you can't calculate a significantly high ROI off the top of your head, then you really need to analyze these reports and find out why. SEO done right can turn on business like a faucet. If you need the reports we provide there is probably a problem, but it’s always better to have great analytics and reporting and not need them, than to need them and not have them.