How to Interpret and Evaluate Your Home Care SEO and PPC Campaigns

Organic Search: Organic traffic represents visitors who found your website through searching for specific services or an answer that you can provide. These are typically highly-qualified visitors who are likely to be a captive audience and more likely to convert to a client. As a result, you’ll want to know from your provider how many of your goal completions were the result of organic search traffic. This may even be further delineated to show how many of those visitors came through a regular Google search versus how many clicked to visit your website through your Google Business Profile.

Engagement: Engagement metrics track how people are interacting on your website. This can be measured in several different ways:

• Bounce rate – How many website visitors come to your site only to leave without any interaction? This metric is crucial to determining where there may be something missing from your website. You can expect a high bounce rate if visitors feel spammed with too many calls-to-action or bored by lack of relevant content. On the other hand, there may be instances (for example, blog posts) where bounce rate is expected to be higher, especially among returning visitors. In cases like that, metrics like scroll depth, discussed below, should come into play. 
• Pages per session – On average, how many pages are visitors looking at each time they visit your site? This is a fantastic metric for understanding which pages best resonate with users and successfully guide them deeper into your site. It can help you identify issues with internal linking, conversion rate problems, or lack of content on specific pages.  
• Average session duration – On average, how long do people spend browsing your website each time they visit? This is one of the most telling engagement metrics, because it helps you understand how effective your website is in satisfying user intent (something Google is putting more and more emphasis on).  
• Returning visitors – More returning visitors means a larger group of engaged people who are not only more aware of your brand, but also more likely to be open to building a relationship. Returning visitors mean that your touchpoints are working and people are satisfied after you make your first impression. Remember, potential clients often browse multiple providers before making a decision, so increasing returning visitors may be an area that is key to winning business.  
• Scroll depth – Do website visitors actually read your content? Scroll depth, especially when combined with other engagement metrics like session duration or returning visitors, gives you a clear picture of exactly how much content users are actually consuming. Even better is knowing how far visitors tend to scroll down a page to help you determine what to do with page content or where to place important information or calls-to-action. 

Conversions: It’s important to ask your provider what constitutes a conversion, and to make sure you’re in agreement with that definition. In some cases, your provider may consider a conversion as someone who stays on your site for more than two minutes or someone who visits more than two pages in a single session. While these are great measures of engagement, neither of these actions accurately reflects a conversion. Instead, a true conversion is someone who makes contact with you, such as through:

• A chat box 
• A phone call 
• An email 
• A contact form 
• An employment application 

Site Speed: Site speed is important from the perspective of setting a baseline, but it isn’t something you need to be overly concerned with, and here’s why: Google uses a sample rate of only 1% of your total visitors to determine site speed. Therefore, if you have a small website that receives only 100 visitors in a particular month, then Google is only looking at site speed for one of those visitors—and that one person may simply have a slow connection. If you want to know more about your site speed, however, talk to your SEO provider. There are ways to get more accurate metrics within Google Analytics.

Keywords: This is something every SEO provider should be tracking, and your provider should be able to clearly articulate how they developed the keyword list that they’re using. Keyword research should ideally involve gathering data on your competitors, market insights, and your own website to find opportunities where there’s enough traffic and search volume to help you rank well and drive some solid traffic.

Competition: Each search marketing agency may provide competitor insights a little differently, and that’s ok. What’s important is understanding how you stack up against the competition. Ask your provider for specific details on:

• What your competitors are doing
• What keywords they’re ranking for
• What backlinks they have in place

Competitors: As with SEO, you’ll want to know what your competitors are doing. Your provider should be able to offer competitor insights that include:

• A sampling of keywords your competitors are bidding on 
• An estimate of competitors’ monthly PPC spend 
• What some of their ads look like 

Be sure to ask your provider how you’re stacking up against your competitors if the data provided in the report isn’t clear. 

Conversions: Also like SEO, you should be able to see both what your conversion numbers are and what specific actions are being tracked.

Industry Averages: For PPC, it’s important to understand how your performance stacks up against industry averages. These benchmarks give you an idea of the results to expect and can help you better understand how well similar paid marketing efforts are working for companies like yours. If your report doesn’t include this information, your provider should be able to give you the information you need to measure your performance against.

The Four Cs: If you really just want a high-level determination of how you’re performing, the following four metrics will give you a good apples-to-apples comparison across the board:

• Click-through rate
• Cost-per-click
• Conversion rate
• Cost–per–conversion

It doesn’t matter if you’re spending $100 or $100,000 per month; these numbers will calculate the same.