Unlike paid advertising or social media marketing, SEO takes time to be effective and in order to obtain the ROI for your campaigns you need to be aware of how to measure SEO success.
Measuring your SEO depends on your industry and your business goals, however, three KPIs remain the same across all campaigns:
- Keyword Rankings
- Traffic
- Conversions/Leads
By measuring these metrics, you will be able to not only measure the success of your SEO changes but also create an action plan to improve your campaign going forward.
It is shocking how many webmasters actively try and improve their SEO but don’t have any tracking in place, not even Google Analytics, to see if their efforts are actually working. Without tracking in place, you could be unknowingly making your rankings worse.
Organic Rankings
When it comes to SEO, organic rankings are the most sought after KPI of them all. Being on page 1 of Google is every webmaster’s aim, especially as studies have proven that websites who appear on page 1 snap up 92% of all traffic.
By using specialist software to track your rankings you will be able to identify how well your optimisation work is performing and identify areas or keywords that aren’t ranking as well as others.
Alternatively, if you aren’t seeing any upward changes at all in your rankings then this will help you identify any potential problems with your website or just perhaps that the keywords you are optimising for are too competitive and you may need to identify other long tail keywords instead.
Organic Traffic
A successful SEO strategy should continuously bring in more organic traffic over time, the amount will depend on your target audience and industry size. For example, a small local business that only serves a specific area will get considerably less traffic than a nationwide online retailer.
Monitoring the amount and performance of organic traffic coming from major search engines should show you whether or not the traffic you are getting is relevant. The quality of your traffic is an important KPI as it will show you if you are optimising your pages correctly for the right keywords; increased organic traffic is only a success when the user finds what they were after and don’t bounce back to Google, otherwise you may be attracting the wrong audience.
Three metrics that can help you determine traffic quality are:
- Bounce Rate
- Average Visit Duration
- Pages Per Visit
When monitoring your organic traffic, you should review these metrics and look out for:
- Pages with a high bounce rate
- Average visit duration is low
- Pages per visit are minimal
All of the above issues suggest that the title tags and meta descriptions of your pages are misleading and do not include the information they were looking for.
Conversions/Leads
So, you’ve optimised your pages with keywords and have increased your organic traffic – now we wait for conversions.
Conversions will differ by business and industry, not every business has the same business goals and it would be naïve to assume as much. If you are looking to increase leads then the obvious things to track would be: contact form submissions, call back requests, phone calls, emails and more. These are your primary goals but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t track lesser goals.
Not everyone who visits your website is ready to sign up or purchase, they may be early in the buying process. Due to this, you should also track micro-conversions such as newsletter subscribes, social clicks, downloads and video plays. These many eventually turn into leads and will also help you understand the quality and relevance of your organic traffic.
Is SEO not working for you? Has an old agency made changes and you’ve seen a decline? Drop us a line and let’s talk about a solution!