How to Measure SEO Success

How to measure your seo success



Accurately measuring the success of an SEO campaign depends on your business type and objectives. So, there are 3 key performance indicators (KPIs) you should always consider when measuring a campaign's effectiveness.


- Rankings
- Traffic
- Conversions

These 3 factors can also provide you with provable data to improve your campaign over time.

Rankings


Keyword rankings are the most usual KPI, especially when research shows that websites listed on the 1st page of Google get up to 92 percent of traffic. Tracking keyword rankings over time gives you the ability to design your SEO strategy around the keywords that needed the most attention and offers the most benefit.

For example, let’s say you’re tracking 20 keywords, and five of these are on the first page of Google. You know that in order to take these five keywords on the first page, you will have to invest more optimization efforts for them.

On the other part, you can discover that these keywords are just too competitive, and based on your analysis, would not provide enough benefit to warrant the effort. It would be more useful to focus efforts on the additional 15 keywords in order to get them into the top three positions, where they’ll really pay off. Without keyword ranking data, making informed strategic decisions such as this might be very difficult.

While maintaining track of rankings is important, it isn’t enough. You must also understand how these keywords translate into increased good traffic.

Traffic


Measuring the volume and accuracy of traffic that 1st page rankings deliver is necessary. 1st page rankings are meaningless if they don’t give enough of the proper kind of traffic.


Traffic Volume


Traffic volume should be calculated based on the number of visits that gets from organic search. With a productive SEO strategy, you should see a good increase in organic search traffic.

How much traffic you should expect depends on the size of your target audience. For example, a successful SEO campaign that targets people who are looking for online business card printing nationwide will deliver significantly more organic search traffic than a successful campaign targeting people who are looking for a local dentist.


Traffic Accuracy


Measuring the accuracy of traffic is a bit trickier as it needed more careful analysis. Some metrics that can be used to calculate the accuracy of traffic include:

Pages Per Visit
Average Visit Duration
Bounce Rate

When reviewing these metrics, if you find that the average number of pages viewed per visit is low, the average time visitors spend on the site is also low, and the site’s bounce rate is high, you may have discovered there is either an issue with your website or with the type of traffic your keywords are delivering.


Conversions


Conversions should be set based on your specific goals.

Let’s say your goal is to increase leads. With this in mind, conversion tracking may include contact requests, quote requests, appointment requests, or phone calls to name a few. It’s also necessary to distinguish between conversions from organic search, and conversions from other sources.

It’s important to note that not all visitors are ready to buy, and neglecting to measure the actions of those visitors is a mistake. These conversions can be defined as newsletter subscriptions, social shares, whitepaper downloads, and other actions visitors take that indicate they are interested in what you offer. These types of conversions also serve as a great traffic quality indicator.

With conversion tracking in place, you can take the campaign full circle by knowing which keywords are generating these conversions, and why.

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