SEO success 'should be measured by organic traffic'

15/10/2008

Firms looking to establish how successful their search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies are should look at the lift in organic search traffic, it has been claimed.

This is instead of the ranking reports which are flawed, according to Mark Jackson at SearchEngineWatch.com,.

He says that the reason for this is that they depend on everyone seeing the same set of results, but this does not always happen, because search history and logging into Google can change results.

Mr Jackson said that firms that have a seasonal element to them should keep a record of organic search traffic and compare them on a year on year basis.

He adds that keeping the same analytics provider is also important because different software will report varying results.

A recent study by SLU Systems revealed that 93 per cent of ecommerce retailers believe SEO will increase in effectiveness in the next three years.