Key Performance Indicators for Long-Tail SEO

As we have discussed throughout this book, the long tail is an important part of SEO. Metrics are available for diagnosing the health of your long-tail search traffic. Here are some that were developed by Brian Klais of Netconcepts:

Branded-to-nonbranded ratio

This is the percentage of your natural search traffic that comes from branded versus nonbranded keywords. If the ratio is high and most of your traffic is coming from searches for your brand, this signals that your SEO is fundamentally broken. The lower the ratio, the more of the long tail of natural search you likely are capturing. This metric is an excellent gauge of the success of your optimization initiatives.

Unique crawled URLs

This is the number of unique (nonduplicate) web pages on your site that are crawled by search engine spiders such as Googlebot. Your website is like your virtual sales force, bringing in prospects from the search engines. Think of each unique page as one of your virtual salespeople. The more unique pages you have, the more opportunities you have to sell through the search engines.

Search visitors per contributing page

This is the percentage of unique pages that yield search-delivered traffic in a given month. This ratio essentially is a key driver of the length of your long tail of natural search. The more pages you have yielding traffic from search engines, the healthier your SEO program is. If only a small portion of your website is delivering searchers ...

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