SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting your website to rank well on the natural listings of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. As the industry becomes more educated on the topic of SEO, many companies are now engaging in the optimization process so as to get high rankings for their websites.

However, SEO is not always about ranking and position. You need to look at traffic and conversion too. When your site is being optimized, you need to track the amount of organic search engine traffic that comes to your website. For most web statistics tracking software, you will be able to know the exact keywords that searchers type to find your website. Tracking of organic traffic is very important as you can analyze the information and fine tune your optimization process.

Now that you know the amount of organic traffic that you are getting, it is time for you to calculate conversion rate. Before you can calculate conversion, you need to determine the goal of your website. In other words, what you wish to achieve from your website? Is your website an e-commerce store that generates direct online sales? Or are you intending to use your website to generate leads for your services or products, and close the deals offline? After you have determined the goal of your website, we will have a KPI or Key Performance Indicator to work on.

If you run an e-commerce site, your conversion calculation will be pretty straight-forward. You need to have a web statistic tracking software to track the path that visitors take when they reach your site. Then, use the number of sales resulted from organic traffic and divides it by the total organic traffic to your website. Then multiply it by 100. This will be your conversion rate for SEO.

If your business deals with offline sales and services, what you can do is to place an unique phone number on your website that is not use elsewhere. So whenever there is any enquiry to this phone number, you will know that it comes from your online marketing effort. Then, instruct your phone operator to always ask anyone who calls in on how he or she finds your website. When tracking conversion for offline sales and services, it is near impossible to get a 100% accurate number. But at least, you will have some numbers to work on.

Any marketing effort needs to be measured in order to produce good result. I know that it is very tedious to measure some of the online marketing campaign like SEO. You can choose to just look at keyword rankings and positions. But if you do not know the actual conversion rate and numbers from your SEO effort, you will never know how well your website fares in the optimization war.