The challenge of measuring the success of an SEO campaign can be a bit abstract. Every SEO will have their explanation. Best one I’ve heard yet? “Look at our page rank!” I’m sorry, even though page rank is important, it is not the end all be all. All that page rank means is you have lots of links to your site.
When is Page Rank worth using? Well if you need a QUICK idea of a pages strength, it can be useful, however it is a VERY basic level of analysis, and if your SEO call it’s the end all be all, I’d pick up ship and look elsewhere.
Skewed Page Rank
Frye / Wiles has a fairly natural Page Rank since we build websites. Each of our sites we build normally has a link to our site, building up our page rank. If we focused on web hosting for lower level sites we would have more sites built, and more inbound links that we controlled, building our rank even higher.
If our page rank is important, then why is it that most of our Search Traffic comes to pages that are Page Rank 3 or 4 instead of our homepage of 5? That’s because we understand SEO. How do we measure our success for our internal SEO? We measure it by how many qualified visitors we have coming to our site.
Results Oriented SEO
The best way to measure the success of SEO is your bottom line. If your goal is to receive service inquiries on your website, our goal as an SEO firm is to get you service inquiries on your website. As a business owner, you care more about bottom line than a badge of “look at my page rank!”
The real reason we measure page rank and swoon over it as an SEO is that it is a helpful indicator as to how GOOGLE sees each pages strength. When Page rank was a legitimate measure of this, it helped us figure out which pages to use in the campaign. One of the big things to come out of the latest SMX advanced expo was that page rank is not the best indicator for how google sees your site.
This year it seems like the big thing is crawl rate. Is this the new thing we should start bragging about? Pulling our hair out over? I have seen Crawl rate increase at the time of traffic increase, this is really common in blogs. However, some of the strongest landing pages I have seen rank get crawled once a month or LESS.
Real “Page Rank”
So how can we measure a pages strength? You can plot a pages ranking for its target keywords. Do this over time; If the page is growing in rank, then its strength is growing. If it is dropping, then you better do something. Do this with 5-10 keywords, and you have a solid idea of a pages performance. If you are an SEO and looking for a better idea of how to track success, check out SEO Theory, a blog about SEO.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. If you are not willing to do some serious tracking like this, then how can you expect to make progress. Also this sort of method helps you track progress across all search engines. If your SEO is ignoring yahoo because Google is a bit larger, then they are wasting your time and money.
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