If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve invested in search marketing and would like to know if your investment has been well placed. Right? But is your SEO working?
One of the biggest challenges with running effective Search Engine Optimization campaigns is the doubts surrounding whether 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 critical to illustrate success through complex numbers and not allow a client to take your word for it (which often causes clients to cancel quickly). Additionally, if you’re doing your SEO, you’ll need to be able to analyze your results to decide where to focus your marketing efforts.
Below, I’ll illustrate five ways to find out 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 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 an excellent measure of success, but only if you compare it to baseline traffic measurements. These measurements should be taken at the beginning of each campaign to compare results. If you don’t establish baselines for future comparisons, you’re setting yourself up for failure when deciding whether your SEO genuinely works. In the future, could you 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 matter. Even though 60%-70% of all traffic comes from long-tail search phrases, they make a difference. You can often show a solid correlation between search engine rankings and search engine traffic.
A client will often say,
“How do I know if I’m getting more traffic 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 simultaneously as traffic increases? These are the types of correlations that are important to illustrate the client.
Like traffic, it is important to set up baselines with rankings. First, decide on which high-volume keywords to track rankings for. Then, compare the baseline reports to reports you run in the future to decide if there is a net increase or decrease. These results should help you understand your campaign’s success or problem areas.
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.
You can tell if your site’s “visibility” is increasing in several ways. These metrics are all dependent on your gathering of baseline data from which to draw a comparison:
Pages Indexed – An SEO campaign ensures that all your site’s pages are indexed. First, you must 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 – Any SEO campaign aims to broaden your website’s reach by ensuring you rank well for a 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.
Increase in “Other” Areas
Several other metrics in SEO 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. Could you check these metrics a couple of months down the line to see if they’ve increased or decreased?
Conversions/Leads
Though this is listed last, it is usually the most important in the eyes of business owners and marketers. Why put money into something that doesn’t yield more leads, conversions, sales, etc.?
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 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, explain how and why leads, conversions, and sales occur.
The bottom line with SEO is that the reason most people do it is ROI. Suppose the Return on investment is there, and you can prove that it correlates directly to your SEO efforts (and not another initiative). In that case, you can tentatively say that your Search Engine Optimization efforts are successful.
In conclusion, when you consider all these things together, you should be able to accurately picture where your Search Engine Optimization campaign has succeeded and failed.
I hope this helps – happy optimizing!
