One of the biggest problems with SEO is that it’s not always obvious whether your search engine optimisation efforts have had the desired results.
If you work with an SEO agency, you can ask them to produce a monthly report (they should offer this service anyway) that shows your current rankings, traffic statistics and the results of any other campaigns you have going such as PPC or social media marketing campaigns.
If you’re handing your own SEO, you’ll need to spend some time analysing the facts and putting together your own report. The good news is that there are many tools out there to help you and the data is relatively simple to understand. Below, we’ll show you 5 ways in which you can break down your SEO results to see what is working for you, and what’s not working so well. Google Analytics is one of the best free analysis tools out there today and it can give you a breakdown of all the SEO areas mentioned below.
Traffic
When measuring your SEO success, the first stop is probably going to be website traffic. Traffic is only a good measure of what’s going on if you compare it to baseline traffic statistics. At the start of every campaign, take a baseline snapshot of your traffic and use this to compare later results. You can then easily determine whether there has been a net gain or loss in traffic.
Rankings
One of the main purposes of SEO is to increase your rankings with the search engines. Just as it’s important to establish a baseline for measuring traffic, it’s important to do the same with your rankings. You have probably already built a list of keywords you want to rank for. You can use these to track your current positioning on the search engines. Setting a ranking baseline right from the start will help you to understand whether your rankings are increasing or decreasing and that you need to focus on particular keywords if they are not performing so well.
Increased Coverage
Increased coverage means increasing the overall exposure that your website is getting. There are a number of methods you can use to measure this. Again, these metrics should all be based on a baseline measurement. First, let’s take a look at how your pages are indexed. The aim of any SEO campaign is to ensure your pages are being indexed by the search engines. You should have a rough idea how many pages your website has. Establish a baseline and check your rankings at a later date to see whether that number has increased or decreased. If you are adding lots of fresh content in the form of blog posts and articles you would certainly expect that figure to go on increasing.
Leads and Conversions
Though we’ve included this last, leads and conversions are usually the most important aspect of SEO if you are a business owner or marketing entrepreneur. The bottom line of search engine optimisation is the return on investment. If your website is converting visitors then you must be doing something wrong. Better traffic and rankings don’t always mean higher conversion rates, but if you have got the content on your website right and you are offering something that people want, you’ll experience more conversions if you can get the people to your page.
In summary, analysing these components together can give you a really good idea of how your website is performing. If you are experiencing a good return on investment and this directly correlates with your SEO efforts, you can usually say that you are going in the right direction with your marketing campaigns.
However, SEO does that time to learn and it certainly takes time to implement and manage. If you’re finding SEO is starting to effect the running of your business, speak to our team today.
