Are you running a SEO campaign and are not sure exactly what the benefits are to your business? It may be that you are not monitoring the correct things to get the necessary information. The aim of this article is to provide you with some information on the best ways to monitor your SEO campaign.

The information in this article is helpful for those people who do their own SEO but also for those that don’t so you know what to look for and can make sure you are getting real benefits from it.

You will often find that SEO is measured in terms of where you rank in the search engines and showing an increased position is the aim of the campaign. However there are problems with using this kind of measurement. The main ones being that not every person will see the same results from the search engines and there are a lot of things that can affect what an individual sees. Secondly your actual position will change on a regular basis and in some cases hour by hour and so the accuracy is not clear.

Knowing this it is clear that you cannot measure the performance of your SEO campaign purely on increased positioning in the search engines. So how do you know how successful your campaign is? Well the answer to that is to view the traffic that is coming to your website and also how they are coming. It is important to look at this long term, for instance, if you are a company that does most of its business at Christmas then you will need to compare your traffic figures year on year. If you start your campaign in July and you figures increase in December, this is not telling you anything as they probably would anyway. However if you look at July a year after starting you will be able to see if there is a change in average traffic.

It is important to know the search terms that you are being found for as well and if there is an increase in traffic for those particular terms. The reason for this is, imagine the case that you have done a large offline marketing campaign and so people know your name. This may result in increased searches for your site, but for you exact name rather than your keywords. This will show increased traffic but this is nothing to do with your SEO campaign.

This said, you will need to set up some form of analytics on your website and ensure that it is set up correctly otherwise you will be getting potentially misleading results. The most commonly used analytic program is Google Analytics as it is completely free and easy to install. Having said that, there can still be some problems when setting this up and they need to be addressed before you begin your monitoring.

One of the most common errors when setting up Google Analytics is that the tracking code is not put on every page of a website. This means a large chunk of traffic may not be reported at all. This is very easy to correct, you can check every single page to ensure the code is included which can be time consuming and you need to remember if adding new pages the same thing needs to be done. A quicker and easier way is to set up an include file which is universal across all pages and the code can be put inside this file.

Remember that if you correct this error you should start your monitoring from the beginning again as you could see a large jump but this will be nothing to do with your SEO and mainly to do with the fact you are now seeing all your visitors.

Another common error on Google Analytics is that AdWords referrals will be displayed as organic search engine results. To fix this enable auto tagging in your Google Adwords account. This will provide more information to the analytics program and so give you more accurate results. To check this, click on your advert and then make sure the URL of your landing page is showing the auto tag (gclid=xxxxxx). Make sure you are not redirecting your landing page this will make the gclid code invalid and so could damage the accuracy of your tracking.

Another thing to consider is to make sure your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts are properly linked which will help with getting the more accurate results. If you want to track other PPC campaigns you can use the Google Analytics link builder.

Remember to analyse what you have and make it as accurate as possible. It is very easy to get false results and so think you are having success when you are not. If you are not sure how to set up your analytics, ask a professional, either your web developer or Google themselves.

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