SEO metrics to track for making money

A big part of why so many people failed to make money online is not knowing which part of the equation did they get wrong. Besides visitors and revenue, I don't see much discussion on what other metrics or indicators a beginner should track to assess their performance. It is easy to say: "just do all the work and you will make money eventually. Behind this statement is the implicit assumption that you will learn your mistakes, correct them and then become successful. However, without seeing any positive results, it is hard to keep going to realise this learning cycle.

In this short post, I am going to talk about two important SEO metrics you should use to track your progress as you learn how to make money with amazon or any other niche sites. This post is not meant for those who want to build authority sites. It is targeted at those who are starting out, learning to build a few mini sites and wants to know whether they are on the right track. As I said in my post on one vs many sites to make money, you need to know your market first before going in 100% to build a large site.

Let's get on with the program.

Making money with amazon boils down to a couple of steps:

• Finding low competition keywords that can monetise well
• Laying out your site and content to maximise conversion (not the expense of the user though)
  
• Increasing the traffic from search engines to your site

It sounds simple enough but there is a lot of details within each of the steps. The last metric is easy to track and one that I will not talk about. The first two steps, however can be cruical during the early stages of your niche site building.


Picking low competition keywords
Learning how to pick low competition keywords will solve half of your problems in making money. If you don't get this part down, you will find it hard to draw traffic later on to monetise your site. To master this aspect, you need to know two things:

• Where to find seed ideas that have no competition: I have said this many times but you need to know how to look at a keyword and research on whether there are new products or markets within that niche. Don't just reply on google adwords because the fact that the keywords appear in the tool means somebody might already be competiting with you on that keywords. Learn to expand your source for seed ideas and you will see that opportunity is all around you. 

• How to evaluate the keyword competitiveness of your niche: I covered this in my post on how to check keyword competition. Check that out. 

How do you know you got this part right?

First metric to track is how well you indexed. If your site indexed on page 1-3 without any serious backlink effort, you are picking the right low competition keywords. If most of your sites don't ranked well when they are first indexed. you are probably picking something that is too competitive for a niche site.


Laying out your site
Once you have the keywords and they ranked well when indexed, you need to learn how to layout your site. No point getting your site ranked well when the visitors are not clicking on your amazon clicks. The first rule of thumb is not to layout your site like a blog. Your amazon sites should look like ecommerce stores. Your visitor's first impression should be that this is a site where I can browse for the products that I am searching for. I will give concrete examples in my future post on this topic.


To know if you are laying out your site correctly, track your visitors to amazon clicks ratios. Anything less than 50% should be improved. Believe me when I say that it is easier to improve your conversion ratio than to get more visitors to your site. Maximise each and every visitor so you do less work in terms of traffic generation.


In summary, these are the metrics you should track when you have very little revenue or traffic:

• How highly ranked are your sites when they first index
• What is the ratio between your visitors and those that click on the amazon link

They will help you to know whether you are on the right track when starting out. Try not to build too many sites until you get these two metrics right with the first few that you have.

Posted in: How to make money with amazon,keyword research,seo tips