One of the things I like about SEO is that the impact of your efforts are measurable. However, there are a few situations that make measurement more of a challenge than you’d expect at first blush.

For example, when: organic traffic and paid search traffic isn’t correctly segmented; conversions aren’t being captured (or the site doesn’t have any traditional conversion points); and the time between an organic visit and a conversion is so great that the two are hard to correlate.

When faced with any of these scenarios, you’ll need to get a little creative with your metrics to show progress.

Page Coverage

The number of pages receiving traffic from organic search indicates that your efforts to optimize internal pages is working. If the site had technical issues that were impeding crawlers, page coverage should increase fairly quickly.

Keyword Coverage

In the same vein as page coverage is keyword coverage. An increase in this metric demonstrates that search engines are developing a better understanding of your content. On-page optimization typically results in an increase in this metric.

Create a Score for Visits

Not all page views on a site are of equal value. So if, for whatever reason, you don’t have conversion data, you can create a conversion metric of sorts by applying a score to page views. You’ll need a decent analytics package for this or you’ll have to do a lot of manual number crunching.

Building the scoring will take some thought, and there are certainly many ways to go about it. For example, you can break your site down into home page, category, sub-category and detailed page types and assign a score to each of those. With such a structure, you’ll be able trend the scores by averaging the score per visit.

Note: Your scoring system will need to account for the decrease in page views per visit that results from implementing SEO efforts, since traffic ends up being directed to the most appropriate page (i.e. users spend less time hunting around for what they’re looking for).

Use Rankings to Show Progress

In my opinion — despite proclamations from others — rankings remain a useful metric. We all know that a vast majority of users don’t click to page 2. That’s where rankings come in — use them to get some insight into what’s happening with keywords that aren’t ranking well enough to drive traffic. If you see 1,000 keywords move from page 5 to page 2, that’s a good sign.

It’s important to remember that web analytics, even when not configured properly, can be an invaluable tool for measuring performance. And a little creativity is all you’ll need to assemble a compelling story to ensure continued support for SEO.