Web Marketing all-in-one for Dummies®

Chapter 8. Analyzing Your Results

In This Chapter

• Using your tracking worksheet

• Knowing what you should track

• Detecting plagiarism

In Chapter 1 of this minibook, I discuss how to set up an SEO worksheet. In this chapter, I go over how to put it to good use so that you can keep track of how your campaign is performing over time.

SEO is a long-term process. Changes you make now may take months to actually impact your traffic, so you need your worksheet to provide a long-term look at what worked and what didn't.

Using Your Tracking Worksheet

You should now have a worksheet that looks something like Figure 8-1. If you haven't set up your worksheet yet, get going!

Figure 8.1. Basic SEO tracking worksheet.

The tracking worksheet helps you do the following:

• Boost morale. Search engine optimization is a long-term game. Progress may happen in months . . . or years. You can look back six months and see you really have gotten a lot more traffic and conversions.

• Match up changes in search with changes in sales. If your offline or phone-driven sales jump 90 percent and your search traffic jumped 90 percent the same month, but nothing else changed, chances are your SEO efforts helped create that burst.

• Obtain a big-picture look at what helped search engine optimization. If you added ten new pages in March and your keyword diversity jumped 50 percent in April and May, that's valuable intelligence you can use ...