Conversion is the best indicator of SEO Success

03/08/2011 in SEO Leave a reply

Check your Conversion to indicate your SEO Success

Google Analytics enables you to set up and track your conversion ‘goals’. These conversion ‘goals’ are probably the best indicator of your SEO Success in my opinion. After all we all are looking for a conversion of some kind aren’t we?

Example Conversion Goals

• A ‘thank you’ page after a user has submitted information through a form. This can track newsletter signups, email list subscriptions, job application forms or contact forms.
• A purchase confirmation page or receipt page
• An ‘About us’ page
• A particular news article
• Any other page to which are trying to drive your visitors

So how do we set Conversion Goals in Google Analytics to track our SEO Success?

I’m assuming that you’ve set your site set up with Google Analytics and you’veconfirmed it’s tracking correctly.  If you are having difficulty get in touch and I will help you.

Go to the Dashboard of Google Analytics and click on ‘Goals’ in the left hand margin. Then click on ‘Set up Goals and Funnels’. See image below:

Set Conversion Goals in Google Analytics to track SEO Success

You will be presented with the Profile Settings for your website.  Scroll down the page until you get to a section marked Goals. You’ll see there are 4 sets of goals available.  Each of these sets can be used to track a different part of your site. For example,  Set 1 – Thank You Page Tracking; Set 2 – Purchase Confirmation Page tracking; Set 3 – AdWords Campaign Tracking.

So, on this screen locate the ‘Goals Set 1’ and click on the Add Goal link displayed in the image below.

Setting Conversion Goals to track SEO Success

For the purposes of this article I am going to be setting up a Conversion Goal for visits to the article ‘http://tickboxconsulting.com/seo-2/860/how-to-use-goo…ck-seo-success/’.

I start by giving it a Name and setting a Goal Type of URL Destination. See Image below:

Enter Goal Information to track SEO Success

Goal Name: We enter a good descriptive name for the Goal  so that it is easy for us to make sense of the goal when we analyse the results.

Active Goal:  Switch the Goal on or Off. If you choose ‘On’, that means that you want Google Analytics to track this conversion goal at this time. Turning it ‘Off’ will only make the goal inactive without deleting it.

Goals Position: The pull-down menu lets you select a goal’s position from within a set so that you can control the order in which it appears from the ‘Goals’ tab in your reports, or lets you move a goal from one set to another.

Goal Type:  Decide on one of the three types of goals that you want. This can be URL Destination, Time on Site or Pages/Visit. I have selected URL Destination for the purposes of this article.

Once you have selected the radio button for the goal type, a field for ‘Goal Details’ should appear. See image below:

Set Goal Information to track SEO Success

On the Goal Details you will be asked to select a ‘Match Type’ from a drop down list of the following options:

• Head Match – A head match matches identical characters starting from the beginning of the string up to and including the last character in the string you specify. Use this option when your page URLs are generally unvarying but when they include additional parameters at the end that you want to exclude. If your website has dynamically generated content, use the Head Match filter and leave out the unique values.For example, a URL visited by a particular visitor might be http://www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=9982251615. In this case, the id varies for every other user. You could still match this page by using http://www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1 as the URL and selecting Head Match as your Match Type.
• Regular Expression Match – A regular expression uses special characters to enable wildcard and flexible matching. This is useful when the stem, trailing parameters, or both, can vary in the URLs for the same website page. For example, if a user could be coming from one of many subdomains, and your URLs use session identifiers, you could use a regular expressions to define the constant element of your URL. For example, checkout.cgi\?page=1 will match http://sports.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002 as well as http://fishing.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=119.
• Exact Match – An exact match is a match on every exact character in your URL without exception from beginning to end. Use this when your URLs for your site are easy to read and do not vary. This option requires that the URLs you provide for your funnel or goal exactly match the URLs shown in the reports. There can be no dynamic (changing) information in the URL such as session identifiers or query parameters.However, to make reporting reading easier, it’s a good idea to remove the protocol and hostname from the URL. For example, if your goal is http://www.domain.com/shopping/thanks.html, enter /shopping/thanks.html as your goal.

I’ve selected Exact Match because the name of the URL I am wanting to set a goal for will be the same for all visitors.

You have the option to set a ‘Case-sensitive’ flag and a ‘Goal Value’.

Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, Average Score and other metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is £500, you might assign £50 (i.e. 10% of £500) to your “Contact Me” goal. By contrast, if only 1% of mailing list sign-ups result in a sale, you might only assign £5 to your “email sign-up” goal.

For the purposes of this article I am not setting a Goal Value.

Next you can set up a Goal Funnel. Although I am not going to do this for this example, as I am purely measuring visits to the URL. However, it is recommended if you have a general checkout process such as the kind used in an ecommerce shopping cart.  By using a Goal Funnel, you can see how many users completed different steps of the checkout process.

Set up Goal Funnels to track SEO Success

Click on Save Goal and That’s it!  You’ve set up your first Conversion Goal. You are ready to really track your SEO success.

These steps can be repeated to set up different goals for different areas of your website – for instance, how many people subscribe to your blog after reading a post?  How many people completed your checkout process? How many people bought a sale item?

All of the above are key indicators of SEO Success…

When you find Keyword Phrases that convert for you, its a good idea to do even more optimisation around the particular keyword phrase with a view to pulling in even more targeted traffic to your site. Of course, on the other hand, if you have a keyword phrase that does not deliver, you need to work out why not.  Perhaps the keyword phrase does not reflect what you are providing on your website or perhaps the search term itself is too generalised.

At the end of the day, whatever the reason you are doing SEO Optimisation, there are some very obvious signs that an SEO Campaign is working well and you dont need Google Analytics to tell you this… It could be a spike in orders, or increased subscribers to you blog, or even extra emails & phone calls as your campaign gains momentum.

If you are having trouble setting conversion goals or have questions about tracking SEO success please post a comment below or drop me a line.

If you liked this series of posts perhaps you would like to let me know. Why not Like my Facebook Page or Follow me on Twitter. It would be nice to get your feedback.

I wish you all great SEO Success…

Other Articles in this series:

Don’t use Search Engine Ranking to Track SEO Success
How to use Google Analytics to Track SEO Success
Conversion is the best indicator of SEO Success

analytics, blackpool, calculate ROI, campaign gains momentum, caption, Conversion, conversion goal, conversion indicator, fylde, goal link, Goals, google, google analytics, Indicator, job application forms, Keyword, Lytham St Annes, newsletter signups, optimization, purchase confirmation, return on investment, seo, seo optimisation, Type, URLs