Search engine optimisation is not an exact science, but it is a form of marketing and thus needs to be measured in its performance to monitor whether it is working. We have mentioned before that the ongoing process is one of our key differences from other SEO companies. However, I want to explore here one of the particular metrics that we use to evaluate a campaign.

If you have ever spoken to us, you will know that we use a relatively small list of terms to optimise a website, and these are the key terms that you and we have jointly highlighted are the ones that are most relevant to your site. Unlike a PPC campaign, it is not necessary to specifically target every possible minor phrase, "the long tail", in order to appear for that search.

Increased trust and authority

What an organic search campaign does for you, besides targeting your benchmark keywords, is improve the authority of your website and its general reputation with the search engines. It increases the trust that the search engines have that your site has good content for users.

What happens when this process occurs is that the number of keywords people are using to reach your site should increase over time. Vertical Leap calls these "attracted keywords" as they are the phrases that are used to reach your site that have not been specifically targeted.

A large number of attracted keywords highlights the strength of the site overall. It is slightly dependent on content - a smaller site with fewer pages will have less attracted keywords (a shorter tail) than a large website with lots of pages - however, throughout the time of a campaign with us, we expect to see the number of attracted keywords grow substantially.

Using this information as an indicator of future performance

For the campaign managers at Vertical Leap, it is a good indicator to us of the increasing strength of a campaign throughout its lifetime. Sometimes, where the keywords are extremely competitive, we see not very many good positions in the first few months for the keywords themselves, however, the increasing number of searches being made that do reach the site show us that the trust and strength of the site is being increased by the work we are carrying out, and we can be confident that over time, the site will start producing good results.

Demonstrating this to our clients

We have been using a keyword growth report for some time in some of our campaign reports, but recently we decided that this information was important enough that we wanted our clients to be able to access this information every time they logged into Apollo. Therefore, a new graph has now appeared in the Performance section of Apollo, so that they can track the results themselves. Here is an example graph where we can see that the attracted keywords have grown from about 800 a month to almost 2,700 a month - a three fold increase in searches reaching this site causing a corresponding increase in traffic. Can you see where the optimisation started to kick in?