Tracking search engine optimization ‘campaigns’ or results is not even close to being as easy as tracking and monitoring paid search advertising results. Why? Well, just think for a minute. With PPC, you define exactly which keywords you want to advertise, what matching options, etc. then you define what search engines and even what campaign and ad group names. And you can insert tracking codes into the query strings on the ad URL’s to provide your analytics engine with exactly where that visitor came from and what their actual keyword query was. The beauty of PPC is that you have already defined up front what campaign or category that keyword belongs to. Thus, instead of looking at each keyword and how it is doing, a daunting task, you can monitor at a more macro level, the campaign or ad group level, then troubleshoot and go down to more detail from there.

But, what about SEO? You get thousands of inbound organic keyword searches a month, with visitors using phrases you never, ever optimized for. How do you even ‘allocate’ or define what campaign an organic keyword belongs to? With SEO, you optimize specific pages on your site for a handful of keywords but what keywords organic visitors use if never known until you view your web logs or analytics tool. The difficulty is then sifting through these thousands of organic keywords and figuring out what ‘campaign’ or keyword category they belong to so you can have a more macro view to analyze. Otherwise, how do you determine how you are doing with your SEO?