Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex strategy and there is rarely a single “right” answer to any question. Your rankings are the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of interacting factors, and Google doesn’t reveal exactly how its algorithm works (although we have some good guesses based on your algorithm update history).
Measuring the results of your SEO campaign can also be challenging, especially for newcomers to the online marketing field. How are you supposed to determine if your SEO campaign is actually working? And what do you do if that’s not the case?
Before we get into how to tell if an SEO campaign is working, it’s important to define what “working” means to you. SEO serves many purposes for your organization; A higher ranking can increase your brand visibility and inbound traffic. But are you more concerned about the sheer number of visitors you’re getting or which pages are ranking first? Is it better for your business to have 100 visitors with a 5 percent conversion rate or 200 visitors with a 2.5 percent conversion rate? There are no objectively correct answers to these questions, only what is right for your brand.
You should also consider the peripheral effects that SEO can have. For example, most companies looking for SEO invest heavily in their on-site content strategy, which can improve their brand reputation and help ensure more conversions. How do these peripheral benefits influence your judgment of the success of your SEO strategy?
We’ll cover the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) in the next few sections, but before that, take some time to clarify what your SEO goals really are.
Typical SEO KPIs: Is Your Campaign Working?
Let’s say you’ve been working on an SEO campaign for a few weeks and you’re interested in seeing if your efforts are making a difference. You’ve been producing content on-site, you’ve got the technical SEO factors of your website in order, and you’ve been building backlinks like all the experts suggested.
now what
There are a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) that stand out as hallmarks of an effective SEO campaign in general:
1. Rankings. This is the most obvious factor, and the one most SEO newcomers gravitate towards, but it’s not the ultimate measure of your campaign’s success. “Ranks” are how the various pages on your site rank for your target keywords and phrases; typically, you’ll keep a list of all the words and phrases you’re actively targeting and use a tool like SEMRush to determine where you rank (and where your competitors rank). Obviously, the upward trajectory here is a good sign; if you’re improving for all your goals, month after month, it means you’re making progress and your tactics are making an impact.
However, these expectations must be tempered; Some keywords are incredibly easy to rank for, allowing you to rise to the number one position without giving you a lot of traffic or being particularly relevant to your brand. The opposite is also true; You might put a lot of effort into increasing your rankings only slightly for a highly competitive keyword, seeing only marginal benefits from your efforts.
2. Organic traffic. Rankings are perhaps best considered in the context of organic traffic or the number of people who visit your site after discovering it in search engines. In some ways, this is the truest indicator of SEO success; Regardless of how many keyword terms you rank for or how high you rank, that number can be high or low based on factors such as click-through rates (CTRs), search volume, and your competition. You can find your organic traffic figures in Google Analytics and tweak your settings to see your traffic for both your entire domain and individual pages on your site.
3. Domain and page authority. Google measures the trustworthiness of your site and its individual pages based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to it, resulting in an “authority” score. The higher your domain authority, the easier it is for all pages on your site to rank. The higher the authority of your individual page, the more likely it is to rank. Consequently, you can use domain authority as an indicator of your campaign’s progress; a domain authority that is growing is a sign that you are doing things right and a foundation on which you can build pages that rank more easily. There are a few ways to discover your domain and page-level authority, including using Moz’s Link Explorer.
There are a few other SEO-related metrics that deserve your attention, although they aren’t as direct an indicator of your progress as the KPIs mentioned above.
1. Reference traffic. It can also be discovered in Google Analytics, if you’re really into link building you’ll want to look at referral traffic. Referral traffic is a measure of how many people visit your pages from the links you have created. This metric does not affect your search engine rankings, nor is it a by-product of them, but it is a by-product of one of the most important elements of your SEO strategy: your backlinks. The increase in referral traffic is an indication that you are publishing in larger and more important publishers, and that you are gaining more authority for your work. Referral traffic is also a secondary way SEO provides value to your brand, as these visitors are just as likely to convert as your organic traffic.
2. Click-through rates (CTR). What if you’re ranked #1 for your most popular keyword phrase, but no one is visiting your site? This scenario is unlikely, but you may receive less traffic from your listings than you expect if your click-through rates (CTRs) are low. CTRs have a complex relationship with SEO, they affect it and are affected by it, but you can definitely improve your CTRs (and therefore improve the value of each search ranking) by adjusting your title tags and meta descriptions to better appeal to your target audience.
3. On-site behavior and conversion rates. Even with tons of organic traffic, the value of your SEO strategy still depends on your ability to convert that traffic. Spend time studying how your inbound organic visitors behave on your site. Are they spending minutes on your top content pages, reading and interacting with it? Or do they bounce almost immediately? Better on-site behavioral metrics, such as lower bounce rates, may have a marginal effect on your search ranking, but more importantly, they impact the net worth of each inbound visitor. If you neglect these factors, even thousands of organic visitors may not be enough to make your search engine optimization efforts “worth it.”
4. Overall return on investment (ROI). Also, for most businesses, the true measure of the success of an SEO campaign is return on investment, or ROI. That’s because all the pretty numbers in the world (like high rankings and organic traffic) won’t mean much if you’re spending more money than you’re seeing with your basic tactics. If you’re earning more in new sales than you’re spending on all of your tactics, and that gap continues to increase positively, you’re in a good place. Use your conversion rates in combination with organic and referral traffic to estimate the value you’re getting and compare it to your spend. Expenses are easy to calculate if you’re outsourcing your work to an agency, but you may need to get creative if you’re working with an in-house team.
Why SEO takes time (and why not bail out too early):
There is an important caveat to all these considerations. So far, we’ve been covering key metrics and indicators that your SEO campaign is working; if they are showing signs of growth, it means your efforts are paying off. However, SEO is a campaign that necessarily takes time, which means that you may not see positive results in these areas for the first few months, even if you do all the right things. In fact, most campaigns only start to see the fruits of their labor after 3 to 6 months.
Building authority and developing content on-site usually takes months, and you’ll have to wait for Google’s index to catch up as well.
More importantly, the rewards of an SEO strategy in its development stages are much richer than the rewards in its development stages; with a higher authority level, all of your links and pages will generate more traffic and you’ll get more value for even trivial efforts like writing a new off-site post (assuming you do everything right). If you are not growing quickly, analyze and criticize your own efforts, but do not panic; if you leave your campaign too early, you’ll miss out on the best benefits.
Don’t be discouraged if you find that your SEO campaign isn’t working, or isn’t working the way you thought it would; indeed, this is to be expected. SEO is both an art and a science; the most successful professionals aren’t able to launch a perfect campaign from day one, but are the ones who are able to recognize flaws and make corrections when necessary.
Diagnose your campaign early and consistently, at least once a month, and make adjustments to keep moving in the right direction.
