In business school, they teach you that world-class, really effective businesses measure.  They measure everything.  Have you ever stopped to think about how many times you’ve been asked to fill out a customer service survey?  Home Depot and other companyies PAY their customers through discounts and prizes to get people to fill those out.  As the mantra goes “If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.  Your SEO effort should absolutely be no different!

What should you measure?  “Everything” is probably unreasonable.  If you use SUDO web analytic software or something like Google Analytics, you will quickly realize that you can be absolutely overwhelmed with data.  What then is most important?  SUDO suggest that at a minimum you track the following:

• Overall visitors
• Unique visitors
• Percentage of new visitors
• Referring sites
• Number of back links pointing to you
• Keywords used to find your site
• Bounce rate

Those are the key performance indicators (KPI) that you should be partnering with your SEO provider to move.  SEO has often been cited as being complex and a bit of a black art.  I think this is unfortunate because the is a demonstrable cause and effect regarding how websites are built, how they are deployed and how they are maintained.  How all those things happen are driven by performance.  The performance must be measured and tracked and that’s where the SEO scorecard comes in.

If’ you’d like to recieve a FREE sample SEO scorecard that you can use to track your own SEO progress, please register with us today!