Micheal Martinez is an interesting fellow. He writes expansively. Most days he puts out more written content than I put out in a week, and today is no exception. I actually have a little trouble reading his entries because of the small type and compact organization — but that is beside the point. Today he postulates on what SEO metrics are, it is long but if you make all the way through I think he has a good answer.

Traffic

Simple right? The answer to what Search Optimization is all about is traffic. I am a bit of an ego surfer, so is Micheal. I have no illusions — my favorite phrases are essentially worthless — no quantity of number one ranks is going to make me money. I have dozens of strange phrases that I rank on the first page for that bring a significant portion of my traffic (~10%) that have nothing to do with me, but eyeballs are good right?

What you should be looking for at the end of every campaign is roughly this:

Traffic Over Time - Compare total visits for 30 days vs the 30 days before you started. Raw visitor count is the bottom line for many projects.

New vs Returning Visitors – Are you retaining your visitors? Unless you have a explosive growth you want the end result to have stable, or growing, percentage of returning visitors. The repeats are more valuable, in general, than 1st time users. If you have a declining return user base you are likely failing at your primary objective, or you have executed a campaign that targets the wrong people.

Volume of Traffic from Search - A well executed campaign will result in a growth of all entry method if your content is valuable, but a search campaign has little control over the other sources, so you should focus on the trend of search referrals. Your actions points are when you see a plateau or decrease in search volume.

User Demographic by Page – This is the microscope. What pages are significantly different from average? Where did you win? Where did you loose? Use your best and worst performing pages to learn what you need to implement in your next campaign.

Referral Traffic

Backlinks are great, they are like search terms, if they send traffic. You shouldn’t really care who the link is from — if it send traffic. Every eye that sees you is one more chance for someone else to learn that you exist. Most of my referral traffic comes from 5 sites, but I still love every one of the other sites that sends 1 or 2 visits per day. Search is only one means of driving traffic and it should be treated as such, one piece.

If it makes you feel better check your links at Yahoo! or Webmaster Tools but the time that you spend there is not actually productive. Knowing where you have backlinks is not going to tell you why you have backlinks. Looking at individual pages that amass links can help you understand what content is strong and useful to visitors.

Conversions

What is your money maker? A white paper, a product, or a request for information. You may see an increase in your conversion rate by targeting the right terms, relevant terms, but it is unlikely. Traffic is not the same as customers. The Internet is largely, still, a place for browsers. If you are only focusing on building traffic through search optimization you are leaving money on the table. Being #1 for the perfect term won’t make your site easier to use or your offer more valuable.

Once you have traffic — or if you already have traffic — you should change your focus to fulfilling the needs of your visitors. If you have a 2% conversion rate that means that 98% of your increased traffic doesn’t create value for you or your business. Certainly we would all love to have thousands of unique visitors per day, but you are in for a long road if you use that as your platform for success. Organic Search and PPC are a means to an end. Both are only a first step toward that end once you have collected your metrics on where and how your visitors use your site you should focus on leading them to your goal. This means crafting a site that people will return to or send to their friends, focusing obsessively on search will leave you very dependent on thing that you can not control.