FAQs

How will we know if our SEO project is earning its keep?

RefreshWeb discovered, as we acquired more clients and those clients wanted to evaluate their return on investment, that there was no metric that adequately measured the improvement in their search performance—at least, not to our satisfaction. So we decided to develop one.

There are a number of ways to accurately measure what people are doing when they visit your website. But measuring your company's strategic search visibility requires measuring the visits your site is missing out on. Our clients need an easy-to-understand, current metric that is stated in marketing (not technology) terms. The metric needs to capture how a client ranks—on several search engines—on the terms their site is optimized for. And those rankings need to be presented in the context of whether the term whose visibility they reflect is a term people actually search on and buy from, and, if so, how many of those searches is the client's site winning or missing.

The metric we developed is called TASM™, for Total Available Search Market™. To determine a client's TASM share, we take a precise list of keywords we've optimized the website for, and run them through a proprietary formula that factors the search visibility of each keyword and the number of people searching on it, then aggregates the data in order to measure period-to-period performance for comparison.

For any two reporting periods, be they month-to-month or year-over-year, the TASM provides online analysis that can be variably sorted to reflect reach percentage, market potential or net gains and losses. Losses in a report need to be further researched, and improvements suggested.