Statistics show that in one month in 2008 alone, over 10 billion searches were done on the internet.  Of course, not everyone who ‘surfs’ the internet is interested in buying something, most use the internet as a means of getting information.  Your site may be getting very high search rates and your rankings may be going through the roof, but what enables you to track whether your SEO campaign is making you money is by tracking your ROI, or Return on Investment.  That is, the amount of money made once your initial investment costs have been deducted.

SEO Campaigns

In simple terms any marketing campaign is difficult to track, if you are handing out flyers, how do you track your success rate?  Again, it boils down to how many people use the information on your flyer to do business with you.  Over a set period of time after your flyer campaign, you would take stock and add up all the business you have done against what your campaign cost.

If you make a profit, your campaign was successful.  It works the same with SEO campaigns. The only difference is the initial set up costs of website and tools. Profits made after ROI are pure profits, you no longer need to lay out huge costs in new marketing campaigns, as you would do in the traditional manner.

Tracking

Any marketing campaign is useless if you are not tracking it.  Internet marketing is easier because of the tools available to do this, tracking your progress much easier.  What reports do is help you track how visitors land on your site, what they there, i.e. what they buy, how they buy and how much they buy.  Tracking will also tell you what they don’t buy.  With interactive websites the norm, tracking tools help you build a relationship with your audience, and this allows you to tweak and improve your offerings and presentation, faster and more efficiently, which ultimately affects your ROI.

ROI = Success

A good ROI is obviously an indication that your SEO campaign is successful, no doubt.  What SEO does to help this is ensure that visitors or links coming into your site are of a high quality and what aids this is high rankings and how popular your site and how valuable your product or service is.  Constant analysis and tracking during your SEO campaign is vital and non negotiable if you want to assure success.

But, the downside is that SEO can become very time consuming and costly if progress is not monitored carefully and the end results are stagnation of your website and loss of business which can take a lot of money to correct.  So too, if your ROI is not giving your what expect, you need to revisit your campaign and tweak, change or improve it in any way you can, for instance monitor your rate of conversion, check you rankings and do what is needed to provide the visitor with what they are searching for.  Only by being diligent will you ensure you get a good return on your investment.

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