It goes without saying that lot of pain-staking efforts goes into making a useful website. However, designing a set of WebPages is just the starting. The more important part of increasing the reach, assessing and sustaining its usefulness comes later. To do this, a technique called SEO (Search Engine optimization) is often employed.
It refers to making the concerned website more search-engine friendly so that it gets a preference over others in being featured in search results. Search Engines use various means to decide where and when should a given website be shown for a particular keyword. So, a constant check to know whether all the aspects are as per the desired level or not is a must. All this centers around the act of 'evaluating performance' that means knowing how far the optimization has succeeded.
The basis for using KPIs for evaluating the optimization activity comes for amount of flexibility it provides in covering this complex task. Some of the areas in which key performance indicators can be framed relate to Website Design, Operational Perspective, SEO Toolbox and Growth of the company. Starting with the very first category, Website Design; it can be measured via KPIs like number of keywords in the website, number of unique pages, number of keywords yielded per page and traffic yielding index. Operations of the Search Engine can be assessed by knowing engine productivity, Index: Crawl rate and Brand to non-brand search ratio. SEO Toolbox can be made fruitful with measures like number of keyword density checkers, header checkers, link auditors and frequency of updating the toolbox. Growth can be sustained by paying attention to percentage increase in visits, increase in search keywords, entry pages, etc.
With hurdles like immense competition, complex nature of the job and a really huge customer base together present a complicated environment for the players. They are required not only to survive but also to thrive in these tough conditions. The information provided by the company has to be up-dated all the time as the sluggishness of services offered is not forgiven by the visitors. They rarely go to a webpage that either has stale information or is listed in the end of the search results. These troubles, however, can be won by devising a tailored 'performance measurement system' like KPIs on a BSC (Balance Score Card).
KPIs are assigned target values or the values the company should strive for. However, the measures should be designed in the light of concerned company's strengths and weaknesses. Parameters should not be considered just because they are being used by the industry leader. This is to say that the sensitivity of an organization's performance to dynamicity of its micro- and macro- environment must always be taken into account and reflected in the scorecard.
To cap it all, optimizing a website according to the demands of search engine involves significant amounts of work. KPIs in this sense have been found to be dependable and actionable in nature, so meet the requirements well. In case of search engine optimization, these can be put down to dig out the effectiveness of search engine or to make the SEO Toolbox more useful etc. All this collectively rewards the webmaster with soaring revenues.