Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

How do you measure the success of your SEO activity?  What KPIs do you look at?  Do you know what KPIs are?  Key performance Indicators and here are a few I use:

SEO KPI 1:  Brand vs Non-Brand Traffic
The percentage of traffic coming from brand keywords versus the traffi coming from non-brand keywords.  Ideally you should aim to have at least 4o% of your traffic coming from non-branded keywords.

SEO KPI 2 – Search Index Saturation
How many pages of your site are indexed by the search engines versus how many pages you actually have. You should aim for at least a 3 to 1 ratio.

SEO KPI 3 – Percentage of Pages Attracting Traffic
How many of your site’s pages are actually attracting traffic?  You should aim to have at least 15-20% of your pages attracting traffic.

SEO KPI 4 – Keywords per Page
How many keywords is each of your pages attracting?  The more the better but you should aim for at least 2 to three keywords per page.

SEO KPI 5 – Unique visitors per keyword
How many unique visitors are each of your keywords attracting? The more the better and it depends on the industry you’re in but obviously you need to aim for the highest traffic/best converting  keywords.

Now that you have a few KPIs to examine, go and measure your SEO success.

Back in June I posted about SEO for Universal Search and how the future of search results will, in some form or another include images, videos, maps, news, books and now blog posts!  Yes, it is official folks, Google will in the coming weeks start to include blog posts as part of its search engine results pages (SERPS).

This news was confirmed by Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience who was quoted as saying that Google search listings will start including blog pages from this week or next.

Google rivals Ask, Microsoft and Yahoo! are all playing the Universal Search game, each with their own version and/or interpretation of what it actually mean.

 Mayer continued:

“We talked about it as a new playground for our engineers and it’s true. We’re actually developing a bunch of interesting experiments in terms of the interface and what could happen in terms of Universal Search.”

The next few months are going to be very interesting in terms of SEO as Google et al decide what percentage of their SERPS should include non-traditional (Universal) results.  However, in my opinion, savvy SEO’s should have preempted this move a while back and should have already started to advise their clients about the importance of Universal Search 

In response to Google’s promise to only keep search records for 12-18 months, asked has announced that it will allow its users to completely erase their search activity from the search engines within 2-3 hours.  This development comes only 6 months after the official announcement by ASK. 

According to the ASK Eraser FAQ, users can now click a link on the homepage that will activate the privacy feature by deleting the IP and any search records conducted by the user within 2-3 hours. 

Its worthwhile to note here that even though ASK are taking steps to increase their users’ privacy, its not completely secure.  This is due to the fact that Google (as a supplier of paid ads to ASK) still has access to ASK’s searches.

There are so many SEO companies out there, each with their strengths and weaknesses, some with very experienced staff who know exactly what it takes to achieve high rankings, and others with no clue what so ever and worse yet, no full time staff but instead, part-timers or freelancers working in cheap labour counties such as India and China.

So how do you choose a good SEO company?

Its not that difficult, it has to do with a bit of due dillengence on your part before you sign on the dotted line.

Here are a few tips:

1. Ask for credentials

2. Check pagerank of SEO company’s site.

3. Check if they’re ranking for any of their industry keywords such as “SEO”

4. Check their previous work.  Check for their client’s sites ranking for keywords they should rank for.  Better yet, get in touch with their clients and ask about them!

Picking the right SEO company is such an important decision as the fate of your site’s success is riding on it.  Choose wisely!