what do you track to measure SEO?

[fromtherooftops]

what kind of analytics reports do you view when tracking SEO?

traffic? revenue? rankings of a subset of keywords? Any others I'm missing?

Thanks!

[AussieWebmaster]

The report that tells you the keywords that brought people to the site.... then check where you are listed and work on SEO for those terms

[fromtherooftops]

we did work for a client's website, but not keyword work. the basic stuff - tags, sitemaps,etc. we want to try and support our actions with analytics.

we know that it may not show much of a lift, if anything, but we want all the report ammunition that a client would typically expect. That's where my question is from.

so maybe my question should be, 'what kind of analytics reports do you view when tracking results to a technical overall SEO site upgrade?'

[beu]

Keep in mind that tracking revenue and traffic by "natural search" requires proper implementation of analytics in many cases. This is important because "analytics" is not an SEO task.

Also, you may find clients without analytics and without analytics it's going to be difficult to track revenue and/or traffic back to the source. You could pull log files but for larger sites that could take hours.

In answer to your question, I'd say increase in target keyword rankings on the 4 major engines for sure!

best of luck

[beu]

As far as what analytics reports to view, kinda depends on the analytics package.

Maybe: traffic by engine, traffic by keyword, revenue by engine, revenue by keyword and so on.

For increase in ranking you need a "ranking report" to compare to the same in your "benchmark". You can "go back in time" so to speak with analytics by changing the dates but not ranking reports.

hope that helps!

[cryptblade]

If you did SEO work, what did you do to it? I mean - if you provided a client with SEO, then you should know the keywords you targeted. Then you'd just show your client what results you got. If you didn't do SEO work, why put yourself in that spot? If you are trying to upsell SEO work, just show them where they're ranking, the SE traffic they are getting - and how you'll fix it for them.

[AussieWebmaster]

rank improvement and traffic increases are good stats to use