I would recommend that you stop taking clients until you know what you're doing.

There are lots of website analyzing tools. I think you should go for them to analyze a website.

There are many tools to analyze your site like Google analytics, Alexa, etc. You can get with that with detailed information.

You should do a diagnostic for on-site and off-site.

On-site:
- Do title tags contain good keywords for their niche?
- Do they have meta descriptions with their keywords in it?
- Are they using H1, H2 etc with keywords?
- Are their URLs keyword descriptive instead of /p245.html?
- Do they have Google Analytics installed?
- Do they optimize for the user experience?
- If not, include some suggestions.
- Do their images use ALT tags with keywords?
And so on.

Off-site:
- What are they currently ranking for, if anything?
- Where is most of their traffic coming from?
- Backlink study from opensiteexplorer.com

You get the idea. It's just a quick look at their basic, most important elements so you get a gist of where they are SEO-wise. Hope that helps.

If the client can't figure those things out on their own, they must be a simpleton.

How in the world are you supposed to determine the clients ROI without having the actual sales data (before/after)? I assume your an SEO guy, why would you be involved in the clients sales data?

Does the client even know what ROI means?

1. Understand the Theme of the site well as 1st step.
2. As per the theme, the keywords and title are tagged or not.
3. Analyze the keyword density of each page.
4. Check Unique page meta tags are available or not.
5. Check for formatted tags
6. Analyze the alt tags and anchor texts
7. Check for XML sitemap
8. Robots.txt
9. Webmaster submissions.

Here are some steps which you can use for analysis a client website..

• Pages Index By Google, Yahoo, bing
• Backlinks
• Domain Age
• Reverse IP
• Canonicalization
• Customized 404
• Google Webmaster
• Google Analytics
• Sitemap
• Broken Links
• XML RSS Feeds
• Spider Friendly navigational
• MOD Rewrite
• Robots.txt
• Google Alert
• Alexa Ranking
• Bounce Rate
• IP Location
• Presence of Meta tags on website

You can do analysis of website by checking meta titles,meta description,content of the website,keywords per page,broken links etc...These all should be checked before performing proper seo tasks on any website.

Allsystems,

In regards to your question about key performance indicators, these will vary based on your client’s type of business/industry. KPI’s for one website won’t necessarily be the same for another. Further, even two websites that are the same may be focusing on different things in which their KPI’s would be different. Ask your client what their goals are for doing business online and the KPI’s will be the metrics that show you how the website is doing on meeting (or not meeting) those goals.

Here is some more information on identifying KPI’s,

KPI: Identifying Your Business' Key Performance Indicators - WAHM.com

Good luck,

Shawn

I believe you are talking about changing the website design which really will have no effect what so ever with the search engines and if you are giving your human visitors a better experience then its all good.

Thanks, you just gave me an idea for web application

Read the title of your own thread, idiot.

I'm not trying to be an azz but that client must be a knob at making business decisions. Why would they ask an SEO what their ROI is, you could make up a fake positive ROI for each quarter just to keep them paying for your services.

Simple

Setup custom reporting in GA:

Visits
Unique visits
Page view
Duration on site
Goal completion
Conversion rate

Goal completion via:
Organic
Direct
Referral
Cpc

Use a 6 month table / graph and add insight.