If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve made an investment in Search Marketing and want to know that it has been well placed. Right?

One of the biggest challenges with running effective Search Engine Optimization campaigns is the doubts that often surround whether or not the SEO campaign is successful.

If you work for an agency or are an independent SEO, you’ll know about the skepticism that usually follows the industry. To combat this, it is absolutely critical to illustrate success through hard numbers rather than allowing a client to take your word for it (which often causes clients to quickly cancel). Additionally, if you’re doing your own SEO, you’ll need to be able to analyze your results in order to determine where to focus your marketing efforts.

Below, I’ll illustrate 5 ways to determine if your SEO campaign has been successful or not:

TRAFFIC

When determining if your SEO campaign is successful, traffic is usually the first and most obvious place that people look. As an SEO company, the most common complaint I get is,

“My traffic is the same; SEO must not be working!!”

Most of the time, this statement is based on cynicism instead of reality.

Traffic is a great measure of success but only if you compare it to baseline traffic measurements. These measurements  should be taken at the beginning of each campaign in order to compare results. If you don’t establish baselines for future comparisons, then you’re really setting yourself up for failure when trying to decide if your SEO is truly working or not. In the future, be sure to compare your traffic to your baselines to see if there was a net gain or loss.

RANKINGS

Many SEOs say that search engine rankings don’t really matter. Even though 60%-70% of all traffic comes from long-tail search phrases, I say that they do make a difference. In fact, you can often show a solid correlation between search engine rankings to search engine traffic.

A client will often say,

“How do I know if I’m getting more traffic is because of SEO? It could be due to a seasonal change.”

That may be true, but what will they say when you show them that search engine rankings have increased at the same time as a traffic increase? These are the types of correlations that are important to illustrate the client.

Lik traffic, it is important to establish baselines with rankings. First, decide on which high-volume keywords to track rankings for. Then, compare the baseline reports to reports that you run in the future to determine if there is a net increase or decrease. These results should help you understand more about the success or problem areas of your campaign.

INCREASED VISIBILITY

How you show whether your SEO campaign has resulted in “increased visibility” can be critical to measuring success. What do I mean by “increase visibility”?  I mean maximizing the total overall exposure/coverage that your site is getting.
There are a couple of ways you can tell if your site’s “visibility” is increasing. These metrics are all dependent on your gathering of baseline data from which to draw a comparison:

Pages Indexed – The goal of an SEO campaign is to ensure that all of your site’s pages are getting indexed. First, you have to have a rough idea of how many pages your website has. Then, measure a baseline to see how many pages are indexed. Lastly, measure your site’s indexed pages in a few weeks to see if the percentage of indexed pages has increased.

Number of Keywords Driving Traffic—The goal of any SEO campaign is to broaden your website’s reach by ensuring that you rank well for a wide range of keywords. When you do your baseline, record how many keywords are driving traffic. After a couple of months, go back to see if the number of keywords driving traffic has increased/decreased.

4. INCREASE IN “OTHER” AREAS

There are several other metrics in SEO that sort of fall into the “Other” areas that may help you determine success. These include:

• Google PageRank
• Inbound Links
• Crawl Frequency
• Increase Presence within social media & bookmarking websites.

Again, this is all contingent on establishing baselines. Be sure to check these metrics a couple of months down the line to see if they’ve increased or decreased.

5. CONVERSIONS/LEADS

Though this is listed last, it is usually the most important in the eyes of business owners and marketers. I mean hey – why put money into something that doesn’t yield more leads, conversions, sales, etc.?
The way I see it, if all things are equal – meaning your conversion rates hold steady – you should see an overall increase just by getting better traffic and rankings. For example, let’s say your website has a 5% conversion rate and you increase your traffic from 1,000 visits per month to 5,000 visits per month. If your conversion rate holds, you should see an increase in conversion from 50 to 250 – a pretty big difference!

As we know, nothing is ever that simple. Many other factors, including design and user intent, play into how and why leads, conversions, and/or sales occur.
The bottom line with SEO and the reason most people do it is ROI. If the Return on Investment is there, and you can prove that it correlates directly to your SEO efforts (and not another initiative), then you can tentatively say that your Search Engine Optimization efforts are a success.

In conclusion, when you consider all these things together, you should be able to draw a pretty accurate picture of where your Search Engine Optimization campaign has had success and failures.

Hope this helps – happy optimizing!