Is SEO promotion suitable for your business? Promotion efficiency. Evaluating the effectiveness of SEO promotion in statistical systems The main indicator of the effectiveness of SEO promotion is

The resource has a good position and the traffic is growing, but it seems that something is missing... Perhaps the site is not selling? Let's figure out how to evaluate efficiency and understand whether money is wasted.

You should not evaluate the effectiveness of promotion only by the number of queries promoted to the top 10, because this is not the most important thing for business. The main goal is to sell services and goods, and performance analysis should be based on this. If SEO attracts customers, then investing in promotion makes sense, but if there are no orders, then the benefit from it is zero, even if the web resource ranks high for promoted queries.

Often questions about performance analysis arise because it is difficult to trace the connection between SEO optimization and increasing the number of customers. There are several basic ways to assess this relationship and effectiveness, which are best viewed through examples.

Questions about SEO effectiveness

The big and difficult question is “How much profit does SEO bring?” should be broken down into sub-questions:

What budget is needed to achieve maximum efficiency?
What to invest in – SEO or contextual advertising?
What percentage of total conversion is organic traffic?
Is it necessary to increase investments in optimization?
What is it spent on? cash?
How do you know what caused your traffic and conversions to increase? Because of SEO promotion, PR promotion or increased awareness?

When analyzing data, keep in mind that the focus should be on trends rather than absolute values. To compare indicators, you need to select similar periods, evaluating different directions separately. Figures may be affected by market dynamics and seasonality. Exist different types conversions: viewing contact information, making a call, ordering a call through a form on the website, ordering a product or service. When analyzing, you should take into account associated conversions, since traffic can be an element of the sales chain. For a more accurate assessment, you need to use several analytics tools at once: Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica, call-tracking, CRM systems.

Algorithm for analyzing SEO effectiveness

Method #1: Estimating your SEO budget relative to your projected revenue

Thanks to this method, you can clearly answer the question “Is it worth investing in SEO?” If you have not yet promoted a newly created web resource, then you can ask SEO optimizers to assess the potential of this site and forecast its performance. Such an analysis should take into account the age of the resource, market size and the possibility of increasing visibility in search engines.

To find out whether it makes sense to invest a certain amount, you need to calculate the estimated return. To do this, in the Yandex Wordstat service, you need to select the queries for which the site will be promoted and go to the “Query History” tab. The estimated level of profitability is calculated using the formula:

average number of requests * click-through rate of sites from the top 3 * conversion * average receipt.

Method #2: Measuring SEO's Contribution to Sales Versus Context

Using this method, you can get an answer to the question of what is more profitable to invest in: context or SEO. To compare, you need to count the conversions received through organic traffic. These include:

calls and requests for a call back;
ordering a service or product;
associated conversions (if the conversion action is not performed after the first visit to the site).

The cost per customer is calculated as the ratio of SEO costs to the number of all conversions. You can use traffic channel and conversion analysis to estimate the overall contribution of organic traffic to the number of orders.

For example, if SEO traffic brings 45% of visitors, and they make 69% of conversion actions, then by spending 20 thousand rubles on website promotion, you can get 450 conversions at a price of 44 rubles. for each. When using contextual advertising, the cost of achieving the goal will be 20 times higher, and the total cost of context will be 393,800 rubles.

Investments in SEO promotion are cheaper, and the optimization results are preserved after the work is stopped. The context works as long as you pay for it.

Method #3: SEO Cost Structure

The structure of website promotion work includes:

optimizer time;
time of the programmer implementing improvements;
purchasing links from quality donor sites;
ordering texts for links;
ordering content for a promoted site.

The approximate budget is from 33 thousand rubles.

For effective promotion, it is necessary to eliminate all technical shortcomings that interfere with indexing and correct display of the resource in search engines. The list of necessary modifications depends on current state website and may include:

programming;
development of adaptive design;
editing the structure of a web resource;
unique content;
content manager and designer services.

Before you start SEO promotion, you should determine the upcoming expenses, calculating your strength for six months of work. A good specialist will help you determine which items you can save on and which ones you shouldn’t. For example, your employees can write content for the site, which will reduce SEO costs.

Method No. 4. Comparing the contribution of SEO and PR channels

This method of assessing effectiveness answers the question “Why did traffic increase: as a result of increased brand awareness or due to SEO optimization?” The question is relevant for companies that use PR activity: publications in magazines, participation in exhibitions, appearances on television.

In this case, for assessment, three types of indicators need to be compared:

branded traffic;
unbranded traffic;
direct visits.

As a result of the natural increase in organic traffic, similar dynamics of growth of branded and non-branded traffic are observed, but there is a time lag. The situation is similar with the number of direct visits.

Sharp jumps in branded traffic indicate an increase in awareness. To more accurately assess the data, you should take into account seasonality, the general state of the market and find out which pages visitors come to. Login pages can be landing pages promoted using SEO, or the main web page of the site. If traffic comes to the main page, then it is associated with increased awareness.

If the traffic increase is uniform and stable, this indicates that SEO promotion is effective. Constant growth and decline in traffic may be a consequence of ineffective work of optimizers.

Method No. 5. Relationship between SEO promotion and traffic dynamics

How many sales will there be if you don’t invest in SEO at all? Is it profitable to change contractor? To answer these questions, we need to consider two situations:

for a web resource that has not yet been promoted;
for a site whose performance has changed after replacing the contractor.

In the first case, you can apply the formula:

income from SEO promotion = (traffic after six months of promotion - traffic before optimization) * conversion percentage * average bill.

Not used without SEO optimization additional channel traffic, so the company does not receive the income it could have had more clients.

When you want to calculate the effectiveness of a new SEO optimizer, you need to take into account the monthly percentage increase in traffic. To evaluate, take the average growth after 6 months of promotion and compare it with the average traffic growth 6 months before optimization. A significant change in dynamics confirms that the new specialist is conducting more effective work. Such measurements and comparisons help to estimate the additional volume of orders made due to promotion.

Method No. 6. Promotion in the context of the market

Traffic may increase significantly compared to the previous reporting period, but not as a result of SEO promotion, but due to market dynamics. To analyze, you need to take several queries specific to your business and find out the dynamics and share.

For example, if the average growth in the market is 36%, and the promoted site has 87%, then the growth is faster than the market. This is a good indicator, given the presence of a large number of competitors in the market.

How to Choose the Best SEO Optimizer

If you have not yet decided on the choice of an SEO specialist, then pay attention to the following signs of a good optimizer:

he constantly asks to coordinate something or check reports. The texts, the developed structure, changes in the site design, and the semantic core are subject to approval;
the optimizer is ready to answer any questions regarding website promotion and its effectiveness. He can back up results with facts and figures, rather than promises that everything will be done;
a good specialist will not suggest filling the site with meaningless content, insisting only on uniqueness and optimization. High-quality useful texts are just as important as the technical component;
An SEO optimizer can explain all the actions that he performs as part of the promotion of a web resource.

Choosing the right specialist for SEO promotion will allow you to more effectively use all channels of attracting traffic. It is necessary to always be aware of the matter and constantly monitor the effectiveness of SEO optimization, so that six months later it does not turn out that the choice of contractor was wrong.

This instruction was compiled primarily for customers who pay a certain amount of money to SEO companies every month and want to learn how to independently evaluate the effectiveness of their website promotion. But it will also be useful for SEO specialists, for whom it is important to understand what kind of return their work brings to the client.

Isn't it enough to track the number of queries in the TOP 10 or the amount of traffic?

No, not enough.

If you only track the number of queries in the TOP 10, then a situation may arise when there are a lot of queries in the TOP 10, but they are so unpopular that they do not bring you traffic.

It may be like this: there is a lot of traffic, but it is absolutely untargeted, and even each visitor costs you too much.

To evaluate the impact of SEO, you need to rely on key performance indicators ( Key Performance Indicators, KPIs).

KPI is a system of indicators that help quantify the results of work. If we talk in simple language, KPI is a measure of results.

What KPIs need to be measured in SEO?

In SEO, the main KPIs include the following:

Volume of targeted traffic;
Quality of attracted traffic;
Project visibility;
Visitor cost;
Cost of conversion;
Return on investment.

Target traffic volume

Target traffic– the amount of attracted traffic, taking into account seasonality, but excluding queries with a brand and stop words.

The main goal is more traffic.

How to exclude branded and stop words?

This is quite easy to do through segments in Yandex. Metrica.

Visits in which ->Sources -> Latest source -> Search phrases

It is important to remember that Google encrypts data for search phrases. To ignore branded words in Google, you must:

Calculate the share of branded phrases in Yandex;
Subtract this share from Google.

How to take into account seasonality?

To take into account the seasonality of traffic, you need to calculate seasonal coefficients. To do this you need to do the following:

Get seasonality data from Yandex. Wordstat for several HF queries on your topic;

Calculate the coefficients according to the instructions from the 4analytics website;

Calculated seasonality coefficients

Determine baseline traffic. Base traffic – the number of visitors per month before the start of promotion;
Apply coefficients to base traffic

The difference between the base and actual traffic will be the effective attracted traffic.

Pros: easy to track, takes into account seasonality and only targeted visitors.

Disadvantages: there is no accounting for conversions; a separate calculation of seasonality coefficients is required.

Quality of targeted traffic

The “Volume of targeted traffic” metric has one significant drawback - it does not reflect the quality of attracted visitors.

But there may be a situation when the traffic is stable, but visitors began to visit only one page, the number of refusals increased, there were fewer targeted actions, etc.

In order to monitor such situations in a timely manner, it makes sense to split the traffic into various qualitative components.

For example, traffic can be segmented as follows:

Poor quality– visitors with a refusal;

Satisfactory– there were views, but no conversions were made;

Good– the visitor made a micro-conversion (went to the landing page, added an item to the cart, etc.);

Great– visit with macro conversion (sale, call).

Such segmentation will allow you to assess the quality of traffic and respond in a timely manner to its qualitative changes.

The main goal is more good traffic.

Pros: easy to set up, takes conversions into account.

Cons: the indicators are influenced by various factors: the quality of the site, the competitive environment - not everything depends on SEO.

How to generate a traffic quality report?

This is quite simply done through Yandex segments. Metrics or Google Analytics. I talked in detail about how to do this in the article How to Assess and Improve Traffic Quality: 5 Steps with Google Analytics.

Visibility

Visibility is an indicator that reflects the visibility of a site based on its semantic core.

In my work I use the following metrics:

These metrics apply to the entire site, a group of documents, a selection of requests, or a document.

Absolute value of requests in TOP-10 / TOP-5 ( symbol TOP10);
Relative importance of queries in TOP 10 / TOP 5 (%TOP10);
The absolute value of the frequency that is in the TOP 10 / TOP 5 (WS-TOP10);
The relative value of the frequency that is in the TOP 10 / TOP 5 (WS% - TOP10).

The report shows that the GIGI category has low visibility (only 17% of queries in the TOP 10), while only 6% of Wordstat are in the TOP 10. This suggests that low-frequency queries are in the TOP.

How to generate a report on such metrics?

The easiest way is to use Power BI. This free tool from Microsoft for business analytics, allowing you to receive, process and visualize data from various sources: files, databases, various APIs.

I described in detail how to generate a visibility report in the article Power BI for SEO - how to conveniently control the visibility of a website.

Pros: directly reflects the effectiveness of SEO, helps assess potential.

Cons: no seasonality taken into account, sometimes does not correlate with traffic, no link to conversions.

Visitor cost

Calculation formula: CPC= Promotion budget / Amount of targeted traffic.

CPC– cost of one target visitor. Allows you to understand whether the traffic you attract is too expensive, whether contextual advertising could be cheaper, and whether you need to reduce your SEO budget.

It is important to understand that at the beginning of work, the cost of a visitor will be very high - in SEO, the delayed result and price decrease in parallel with the growth of traffic.

Pros: can be compared with other channels, easy to calculate.

Cons: no seasonality accounting, no conversion accounting.

An example of price changes as traffic increases

Cost of conversion

Calculation formula: CPA= Promotion budget / Number of conversions.

CPA– cost of the target action. Target actions include submitting a form, calling, purchasing, etc. You decide for yourself what the target action is.

A very important indicator, because it takes into account conversions and traffic costs and reflects the profitability of the channel.

This indicator has one significant drawback - it is difficult to calculate if there are offline conversions (offline store, calls).

It is necessary to connect call tracking and it is advisable to integrate a CRM system.

Call tracking is a call recording system that separately records calls for each channel.

CRM is a customer relationship management system.

Pros: takes into account conversions and traffic profitability.

Return on investment

Calculation formula: ROI= (income - expenses) / expenses * 100%.

ROI– return on investment ratio, which reflects the efficiency and return on investment of the channel.

The problem with this KPI for agencies or private SEO specialists is that not every client is willing to provide all the income data.

You also need to understand that at the beginning of work, the ROI on the SEO channel will be negative; it will begin to pay off only after a few months.

Budget = 30,000 rub.

Income = 67,500 rub.

Pros: reflects channel profitability, takes into account costs and conversions.

Cons: It is often difficult to obtain all the necessary data; it depends not only on SEO.

Bottom line

We looked at the main KPI indicators. Now you can evaluate the effectiveness of an SEO channel not only by the number of queries in the TOP, but also by real financial indicators.

In the following articles, I will tell you how to group all these indicators in one place and create a great dashboard using Power Bi.

Example of a dashboard on Power Bi

We promote websites by traffic and positions. We work openly, arguing the need for all actions and changes. We do not use risky methods. For more than 10 years of operation, not a single one of our clients’ sites has come under sanctions.

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09.01.2019 Reading time: 11 minutes

Make a list of all interactive elements on the site:

forms feedback;
purchase buttons;
constructors and the like.

Then evaluate which of these can lead the user to conversion. As a rule, these are the most obvious elements: the same feedback form, order buttons, clickable phone number. There is no need to add goals to all interactive elements: it is pointless to track, for example, views of a video that does not have a motivating call to action.

Each goal can be scaled and a specific time frame can be set for it; all manipulations can be carried out with “was-now” comparisons, as in the example reports above.

When analyzing conversions, do not forget that for evaluation you need to choose the channel with which the contractor works. In a good way, in order not to get confused in the data, you need to create separate goals for users who come from paid search and from organic.

Based on the analysis of conversions, we can draw conclusions about the dynamics of site growth. For example, it may turn out that since you started working with an SEO contractor, conversions have decreased. To find out why this happened, you need to delve into the analytics of a specific site. However, do not forget that there is seasonality online and it may differ from offline seasonality.

Google Analytics

Now let's discuss the metric's competitor - Google Analytics. This giant is distinguished not only by its intelligence and ingenuity, functionality and flexibility of settings, but also by its methods of data collection. Therefore, there will always be differences in the values between Metrics and Analytics data.

We are interested in the Organic search channel - it contains a list with some of the key queries that brought users from Google organic results to our website:

The table displays a portion of queries because 40% to 60% (in our experience) of data about key queries is encrypted by Google analytics services.

Encrypted traffic is located in the not provided container and eats up most of the information on key queries. This happens due to the protection of user data, https protocols and the reluctance of the search engine Google systems provide complete information about user visits. The Good Corporation explains this by saying that unscrupulous optimizers can use this information to further influence organic results.

There is also a line called not set, which includes queries that Google could not place in a specific channel. These can be user transitions from exotic search engines; queries from contextual advertising not marked with UTM tags also come here.

If in Yandex.Metrica we took keys and looked at their effectiveness, then the evaluation of results in Google Analytics is different due to the specifics of the interface and the structure of the service itself. To continue analyzing the data, you will need to study two other GA features: regular expressions and connections with Search Console.

"Regular Expressions - Keys"

To highlight those key queries for which you can evaluate performance using SEO, in Google Analytics you will need to resort to “Regular Expressions”:

Below are examples of queries using wildcards

Essentially, these are operators that are used in conjunction with various symbols, including keywords. They are needed to sort data using filters:

Any character;

* - condition that the previous character may/may not be/repeated;

Depending on the purpose of the analysis, you can exclude or add data from the regular expression. In the example above in the screenshot, all keywords like “key” and “key” will be excluded from the keys in the table. If, on the contrary, you want to display only certain keywords, then you need to change “Exclude” to “Include”.

key1|key2|key3|key4|key5- only the listed keys in the regular expression will be displayed in the table;
key*.- all keywords that begin with the specified key will be displayed;
key- all queries will be displayed where an error was made and another letter was written instead of “yu”.

The simplest use is to alternate a key query through a pipe, that is, a forward slash. In this way, you can select the keywords that the contractor is working on, and then compare them with the previous or any other period.

"Regular Expressions - Pages"

Regular expressions can be used not only with key queries, but also with pages:

Examples of using:

/ catalog/ example/.+/.+/ - pages in a specific section with four-level nesting
/ catalog/.+/.+ - all pages with three-level nesting
/ catalog/./ - pages where the landing URL uses only 1 character
/ catalog/ c+| b+/ - pages where with a second nesting where the letters “C” and “B” are used in words

The "+" symbol is the number of repetitions of the previous symbol

If, in addition to key queries, to measure results, landing pages, by which efficiency will be measured, then in this case the “Site Pages” report can be useful.

If we look at pages, we indicate not the keyword, but part of the URL - everything except the domain name itself.

As with key phrases, operators here can also be combined, removed and added. By the way, the pipe that serves as the “or” conjunction in the previous example also works here: you can use it to sort several pages for analysis.

Connecting with Google Search Console

By linking Google Analytics and Search Console, you can analyze data from Google Webmaster in the Analytics interface. For our analysis this is a necessity:

Communication is configured in the interfaceGoogle Analytics

Summarizing regular expressions and connection with Search Console in the “Queries” report, you can check the dynamics of promoted queries in Google.

To do this, write out all the keywords through a pipe in any text editor, copy all this and paste it into the query report filtering. We establish a comparison with a certain time period and compare.

It rarely happens that requests grow on their own. Therefore, if you see growth on the graphs by key in all indicators: clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, then you can praise your SEO contractor for Good work and continue further cooperation with him.

Just like in Metrica, you can customize goals in GA. Let's look at some of their features without delving into the settings:

GA has a number of restrictions on data collection, here you also need to prepare for them: the number of goals cannot exceed 20 pieces. If you need more, you will have to create a new view.
Be careful what goals you add to GA, as they cannot be deleted. You can reconfigure it, you can disable it, but you won’t be able to remove the added target from the service.

We usually check that goals are being met after setup and do this several times during one visit. But you shouldn’t be afraid that this might somehow spoil the overall statistics, since GA only counts one goal completed per visit.

Site indexing quality

There are a couple more powerful tools for analysis: the already mentioned Search Console service and Yandex.Webmaster. This is where data on CTR and clicks on the snippet in the search results is collected. The more clicks and the better the dynamics, the more correctly the resource promotion strategy has been chosen.

The updated Search Console has a “Performance” section:

Google Search Console

In principle, it is also in old version, but the name there was different - “Analysis search queries" In this report, you can also see the dynamics of queries without going into the Analytics tools. You can compare it with the selected period and see the effectiveness of organic promotion.

Yandex Webmaster has the same section called “Query Statistics”:

Yandex.Webmaster

Its features are that you can create your own groups of requests, for which you can separately view the dynamics. This is convenient for measuring results when there is a pool of queries that an SEO contractor is working on.

External analytical services

There are also third-party services that indirectly collect information about resources (in order from more accurate to less accurate):

There are a huge number of them, but they have one big disadvantage: they do not have direct traffic data. Most of these services use an algorithm in which, based on semantics and its frequency, they predict the approximate amount of traffic coming to the site.

Individual services, such as Similarweb, buy the data, and in the end, approximate traffic volumes are formed from this mishmash.

Approximate, approximate data is generally the main drawback of this approach to analyzing SEO results. All these services receive statistics from external resources, while Analytics and Metrica directly records every user action on the site. The data obtained from these resources should not be taken seriously; the error can range from 20% to 50% (this is a lot).

And the advantage of these services is that you can get approximate traffic dynamics without delving into all these counter and segmentation settings. You entered the website domain and look at the graphs.

In addition, all these services literally instantly provide data, since loading is carried out from the data cache. And in the same Metrics or Analytics, with large volumes of the site, you will have to wait some time for the statistics to load.

Often such services are paid, and the free version has a reduced set of functions.

In general, such services provide statistics only on traffic volumes, but there are exceptions. The same Similarweb shows the average time spent on the site, the number of pages per session and the bounce rate, but in terms of data reliability it ranks 4th.

Other verification methods

How to check the work of an SEO specialist using other methods?

If SEO work is carried out month after month, but there is no growth in traffic and positions, then perhaps the problem lies in the technical condition of the site, namely in the loading speed. In Google this is an official site ranking factor, in Yandex it is an unofficial one. Simply put, loading speed for a website is very important. Don’t be lazy and look at Google SpeedInsights; perhaps your main pages are taking a long time to load and the contractor either missed it or didn’t pay attention to it.
The work of an SEO specialist can also be checked through link growth. The dynamics should be smooth, not explosive, otherwise you can run into filters from search engines. You can check your link profile using internal services (Yandex.Webmaster, there is a section for backlinks to the site); reports from the contractor itself, which should contain an acceptor page, a donor page and an anchor page, if any; external resources such as Megaindex, Serpstat or Semrush.
If you have an excess number of pages in any of the search engines (for example, Google has 5 pages in the index, and Yandex has 105), then there is a problem with indexing pages on the site. A competent SEO specialist should quickly find this problem and, if possible, eliminate it.
Rich snippets make the site more visible in the search results among other search participants. It’s difficult to accidentally get into the Yandex or Google answer block, so if a page from your site gets there, you can shake hands with your SEO contractor. The remaining elements in the snippets also require the efforts of specialists; without additional actions they are unlikely to appear on their own.
You need to seriously think about situations where “work has been going on” for several months in a row, but the contractor does not send any documents at all and in general everything is limited to signing the contract. There are two options: either the work is carried out tirelessly and there is no time to write a report, or the site is not touched at all.
In the end, if a resource with an SEO contractor begins to grow, its positions appear and grow, traffic increases monthly and this is not related to offline events, then you don’t have to worry about the integrity of the contractor.

As a conclusion, we summarize the SEO performance indicators by which the most unscrupulous SEOs can be identified already at the first stage of verification: speed, links, snippets, indexing. Remember these “red flags” when ordering comprehensive website promotion, and focus on reliable ratings of contractors so that SEO does not cause suffering to you, your budget and website.

The main task of SEO is to attract visitors to the site who are most likely to make a purchase. useful actions. After all, if a site has high traffic but no conversion, then such traffic cannot be called targeted.

To solve the problem, you need to set KPIs in such a way as to protect yourself, your website as much as possible, and to make it comfortable for both the agency and the customer of the services. When choosing KPIs, there are a number of principles that are important to consider. One of the main principles is the ability to manage and control KPIs. It is necessary to decide on goals and promotion strategies. Classic S.M.A.R.T. the approach dictates the following requirements for the goal.

The goal should be:

S – specific (specific);
M – measurable (measurable);
A – attainable;
R – Relevant (appropriate / significant);
T – time-bound.

However, the difficulty lies in how to take into account KPIs in the context of rapid changes in search engine algorithms, randomization search results, sanctions. Since the listed aspects of ranking violate one of the principles of KPI setting - controllability.

Alternatively, along with the main ones, you can use a number of intermediate KPIs related to the amount of work and the dynamics of SEO indicators. Intermediate SEO indicators can be like this:

number of optimized queries
number of optimized title and meta tags
volume and number of prepared materials, texts
volume of man-hours spent on the project
number of quality links provided

When choosing a contractor for SEO, the client should be interested in only two things: cost and result. Therefore, a set of key KPIs should primarily reflect the interests of the business. KPIs should not contradict each other. The agency's task is to explain this to the customer.

Key KPIs in SEO

Target traffic volume
Cost of attracting a visitor
Cost of conversion
ROI (return on investment)

They can be divided into two groups: economic and non-economic indicators.

Non-economic KPIs

This group includes the simplest KPIs by which you can evaluate the results of SEO optimizers.

Visibility by semantic core

To assess growth potential and understand prospects, the site visibility indicator based on the semantic core is well suited. It allows you to numerically assess the growth potential of targeted traffic from search.

Visibility is a numerical indicator that is measured as a percentage from 0% to 100%, and shows what proportion of users interested in your topic, out of all queries in your semantic core, will see the promoted site in the search results.

After collecting complete semantic core, you can estimate what share of the audience sees your site in the search results, and how much more it can be increased.

The ability to numerically assess the growth potential of targeted traffic to a site, quantify the presence of a site in a topic, and quickly analyze dynamics are the main advantages of this indicator. The disadvantages include the fact that the metric is used only for the SEO channel and does not take into account conversions on the site.

Target traffic volume

Main tools for calculation: Yandex.Metrica, Google Analytics, WordStat statistics service for seasonality accounting. You can separately highlight the volume of branded traffic. The advantages of this KPI include ease of calculation and the ability to effectively evaluate campaigns taking into account seasonality in the topic. The disadvantages are the difficulty of planning and assessing growth potential; lack of connection between the number of conversions and real returns for the business.

Economic KPIs

Cost of attracting visitors

CPV (from the English cost per visitor). To calculate this indicator, the budget is divided by the number of attracted visitors. CPV is correctly calculated minus brand traffic. It is important to understand that the lower the value of a given KPI, the better. For evaluation, it is advisable to aggregate data from Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics sources.

The advantage of this KPI is the ability to compare other advertising channels in terms of effectiveness with SEO. The downside is the lack of consideration of seasonality and conversions, because attracted traffic does not always have to convert. This KPI also lacks the ability to assess the potential of an advertising channel's reach.

Cost of conversion

CPA (from the English cost per acquisition) The budget is divided by the number of conversions: calls, orders, requests for services. What action will be considered a target is determined together with the client.

When working with a resource, this indicator needs to be improved, for example, by increasing the volume of search traffic and reducing the cost. Increase targeted search traffic and improve usability. Remove requests that bring refusals and work only on conversion requests. All this is within the competence of SEO optimizers.

SEO channel ROI

ROI (Return On Investment) is the rate of return on investment, an indicator of return on investment.

The closest KPI for business is ROI, i.e. return on investment in a particular advertising channel. The difficulty is that this metric is not controlled or managed by the SEO agency. Therefore, it becomes difficult for a third party contractor to report on this KPI and improve it. For example, the number of sales from a website highly depends on many indicators that the agency cannot control: the work of the sales department, the competence of managers on the customer’s side, competitive prices or delivery conditions, etc.

The complexity of calculating and forecasting this indicator is its biggest disadvantage, and its advantage is its closer proximity to business processes, compared to all previous KPIs. However, you can calculate ROI using a simplified formula: profit is divided by the promotion budget and evaluate the effectiveness of return on investment by period.

Calculation and control of KPI implementation in SEO

How do most KPIs behave if we work with SEO and PPC channels? If we are talking about ROI, then very often it behaves like this:

It can be seen that at the start of work this is a negative value, but over time it shows an increase. Customers should have a clear understanding that the return on investment from SEO does not come in the first month of work, but only after 3-6 months.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Today I want to talk about what is SEO, show with a specific example of your blog how SEO optimization (external and internal) can literally work wonders in website promotion and answer the question why you should never neglect Search Engine Optimization.

In fact, although this article is addressed primarily to novice webmasters, from my own experience I can judge that many established webmasters simply neglect SEO promotion and do not even try to understand its essence, as if embarrassed to look biased in the eyes of their readers. Nonsense. I'm in my first year didn't do Seo In general, I thought that was the way it should be.

There is a very hackneyed phrase that for some reason has become a dogma for many - write articles for people and success will not keep you waiting. Yes, it is certainly a fundamental pillar of the successful development of an Internet project, but it is far from the only one and certainly not sufficient. When I started doing internal optimization the summer before last, my blog traffic doubled in half a year (to about 5,000). Impressive, right?

SEO - what is it, how does it affect promotion?

But when at the beginning of this summer I seriously began building up link mass, the site’s traffic again doubled in six months (to about 10,000). Even I myself was impressed. Well, yes, I had to stain myself with SEO optimization of texts, buying links, etc. things, but there is a result. Do you think that all this is exaggerated and far-fetched? But no.

There is a solution, and it was proposed by search engine developers (read about it). They created platforms (something similar to exchanges) where the user could find resources that answered the question he asked. But this solution has some limitations. Only those resources that were able to get to its first page (the so-called top 10). This means that sooner or later a squabble will begin for a place in the Top 10, and this squabble has begun.

The main weapon in the fight for a place in the sun has become the notorious Seo (from the English Search Engine Optimization). By and large, this is the art of getting on the first page of Yandex or Google for something you are interested in. Search engines still cannot offer any solution that allows sites that are in the search results significantly lower than the 10th position to receive at least a drop from the number of those visitors who enter a question of interest to them in the search engine.

In fact, it turns out that there is no life beyond the Top 10. Therefore, the fight is not a joke and any SEO optimization methods that can tip the balance in one’s favor must be used. In general, the situation is very similar to how it was depicted in the title picture in the article about:

Now about why search engines don't like SEO. Do you know? There are probably several reasons. If you have read the article about relevance and ranking, then you probably understand that optimizers, with their artificial boost, significantly distort and worsen the quality of search engine results. But search engines have at least learned to deal with this problem using the ones I already mentioned at the beginning of the article. behavioral factors(projects with bad content will no longer be able to stay in the Top 10, at least not for long).

But SEO is not only a technology, but also a huge business. Do you know how much the leading companies in this industry will earn? In total, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars, which is quite comparable to the income of Yandex. How, you didn’t know that search engines are extremely profitable and extremely profitable enterprises? Well, now you know. Yandex also makes money by displaying contextual advertising (and Adwords).

Who orders advertising from search engines? Most of them are owners of commercial resources to attract visitors. And the whole point is that both of these businesses (contextual advertising and provision of services SEO promotion) are competitive with each other. Judge for yourself. If you are the owner of a commercial website, you can get to the first page of search engine results in two ways:

Order service SEO optimization and promotion, and then be among the ten most relevant resources to the request in the search results (get into the Top 10 or, in other words, in the organic results)
Pay money to Yandex or Google so that your ad is shown for the same request on the same first page of search results

If SEO technologies did not exist or they were not so effective, then search engines alone would receive all the profits, and so they lose on those clients who preferred promotion to the Top 10 of organic results over contextual advertising. Actually, I wrote about this in some detail in an article about, and gave a pretty clear screenshot there:

Those. you must understand that SEO really works and not using it would be a big mistake. Your potential readers who cannot find your wonderful website through Yandex or Google will not forgive you for this. It’s not enough to create a good project with a unique and the right content, it definitely needs to be promoted to the Top 10 for at least a number of not very frequent queries in order to begin to attract the attention of readers.

SEO optimization and promotion - why is it necessary?

Do you think you can get by with the issue? attracting visitors without optimization? It is possible that for some queries you will get to the Top without effort, but for a huge mass of queries you will remain in the invisible zone for your potential readers (in the article about I talked about how to assess the visibility of your resource on the Internet), even no matter what your content will be good. Until search engines become perfect, you will lose potential audience by neglecting SEO technologies.

You can say that this is not the only way websites live. After all, there is also social media Facebook, VKontakte, microblogging service Twitter, etc. things (thematic social networks, for example, or all the same). I hasten to disappoint you, because promotion in these social networks is not as easy as it seems at first glance, and also very expensive.

No, of course, there are ways to get traffic besides search traffic, and I have already written about this in some detail in the article. But all this works within very limited limits. You alone will not be able to create so many announcements and show such incredible activity to attract thousands of visitors in this way. You simply won’t have time to write quality articles.

See for yourself. When I made the most of all non-SEO-related ways to attract visitors, I only received an increase of a few hundred people per day. Well, some will say that this is already a lot, but keep in mind that it took me a fair amount of time and got boring very quickly. Yes, you will curse everything after a couple of months of such a life.

What can I say in favor of SEO optimization and promotion? What can I say? Look at the sources from which visitors come to my blog. Let's first look at the traffic per day from search engines:

Quite a lot, even more than the 10,000 stated at the beginning of the article. As one would expect, the bulk of visitors come from two giants - Yandex and Google. Most of these visitors found my blog in search results only thanks to internal and external optimization.

While the total number of visitors to my blog during the same day amounted to a slightly larger figure:

Thus, if I neglected SEO promotion in general, it would only be five percent of the current one. Isn't this an argument in favor of search engine promotion and proof of its effectiveness? It seems to me that with beliefs about the need learn to please search engines You can finish and move on to specifics.

No, we need to talk a little more about how it happened that some manipulations with the site (internal SEO optimization) or placing links incoming from other resources (external) can influence the ranking. Well, everything is quite simple here.

Search engines process hundreds of millions of user requests a day and for each of them they must provide a relevant list of sites from the Internet. There is no way to do this manually, so this honorable duty is performed by robots (programs). Well, a robot can always be misled. Remember how Yandex explained the work of its Matrixnet using apples as an example?

The robot cannot taste apples, but it can evaluate them based on hundreds of other parameters. Apples are tasted by specially trained people - assessors. They make their verdict after tasting a small number of apples, and the robot comprehensively studies them and, based on the accumulated data, will then be able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. And what does Seo have to do with it?

And optimizers are just trying to find those very points of influence, by pressing on which they can improve the ranking of their project (climb to the Top 10). If the ranking robot relies on several hundred parameters, then by influencing at least some of them, you can significantly improve the promotion of your site. This means moving towards the first place in search results for the desired query.

Once again, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that now there is practically no slag in the Top 10, or it does not stay there for a long time. But there are much more than 10 good sites and therefore there is a struggle for the Top, the main weapon in which is SEO in all its glory. If you do not participate in this struggle, then you will not get a place in the sun. I think this idea should be clear to you, at least for now.

What factors do modern SEO optimizers take into account?

Now let's get down to specifics. Typically, promotion methods are divided into three groups:

Internal optimization of text, headings, meta tags, removal of duplicate content, etc.
External SEO - getting incoming links to your website using free and paid methods
Usability and content quality - to obtain adequate user behavior on your resource and in search engine results, which will be typical for your topic

The first two groups of factors are aimed at attracting the maximum number of visitors from search engines (due to promotion to the Top 10 for the necessary queries), but the third group of SEO factors is aimed at maintaining the positions gained.

In fact, it is the third that is the most labor-intensive to ensure. You need to have materials that are truly useful and interesting to the user, the creation of which will require you to spend a huge amount of your personal time. Remember that now only unique content is important, but not . For this, search engines may impose sanctions in the form of a filter or a ban.

I have already written a lot and in detail on the topic of SEO, and therefore now I will try to systematize it all and provide links to detailed materials where these issues are covered with all the nuances and details:

In one of the articles I described. Be sure to read them, because this is the basis for understanding Search Engine Optimization. Here you also need to take into account that the words “promotion” and “ranking” have approximately equal meaning. For search engines, this is ranking, and for SEO optimizers, this is promotion.
In another publication I gave examples of those excesses in optimization, for which sanctions may be imposed by Yandex and Google -. I have already mentioned that Seo is not always white and fluffy, and the main thing here is to clearly see the line beyond which you cannot cross. Therefore, be sure to read these warnings.

It is also very important to understand that your site is evaluated by a robot, not a person (if your relatives like it, this does not mean that Yandex will like it). The robot sees him in a slightly different light ( HTML code, text, robots.txt directives, sitemap in xml format, etc.), but he can judge usability and beauty only by the behavior of users on your Internet project.

Your resource, in addition to good SEO optimization, should answer certain(duplicate pages, correct ones, etc.). Have you ever thought about the correct formation of addresses on your website? Have you configured it from WWW to without WWW (or vice versa)? monitor? Occasional unavailability can ruin all your efforts.

Be sure to add your site to the webmaster panel from and not only to monitor the success of your optimization, but also to immediately find out about any problems that arise technical problems on your website. remember to check? Are you all right? After all, this is now one of the many SEO factors that is taken into account when ranking.

Internal SEO. Do you create an approximate estimate before writing an article? "For what?" - you ask me. Probably, in order not to work blindly and not to write on a topic that is not interesting to anyone in RuNet. How can you find out what is interesting to RuNet users? Elementary! And it will help you with this.

Another very important factor in internal SEO optimization is the implementation of linking, not with plugins and extensions, but with contextual links from the body of articles (as, for example, in this publication). Do you know why it is needed? Yes, just this way you can save a lot on buying links.

There are also a number of events that can also be classified as SEO promotion. may be needed for initial stage development of the project, to speed up its discovery by these same search engines. When your project gains some weight and authority, you can try other trust directories, which can give some additional impetus to your project entering the Top ().
There are ones that have not yet been burned in public, but they are already worth money and there is a high probability that they will deceive you and slip you bullshit. At the link below you will find my offer, where everything is without deception and free.
Exchanging links with other resources can also bring you some benefit in SEO promotion, but you need to be careful here, because search engines do not approve of exchanges. I only exchanged backlinks from articles and only with a limited number of sites (a couple of dozen). Now my exchange limit has already been reached.
Next follow paid methods improvements to external optimization, but simply - buying links. I don’t advise you to shop in Sapa and Blogun, because they are pure slag with rare inclusions of diamonds. It is better, in my opinion, to purchase eternal links for your project, for which you will pay once. In the long run they will be more profitable:
- Miralinks— you offer webmasters a ready-made article in which you have added backlinks to the pages of your resource. The best, but rather expensive way of external SEO optimization, because in addition to posting an article, you will also have to pay for its writing (or spend time on it). Just above I provided a link to my article, where I shared the tricks for working with this exchange.
- Gogetlinks- Maybe, the best way carrying out external SEO optimization. In the settings of this exchange, you can set placement only in new articles, thereby making such backlinks as natural as possible.
- GetGoodLinks is practically the same as in the previous paragraph, but the sites there are selected based on their size, which are important for promotion in Google ( and ).
- RotaPost— here I buy not only links from blogs, but also from . Read more about this in the article about.
There are also ways of external SEO optimization - running through directories, site grids, etc. I had a little experience with this, but, by and large, it’s better not to get involved.

It seems like he told me everything. Good luck with your promotion and promotion. The main thing is not to overdo it.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site