A search engine optimization campaign is a great way to attract targeted visitors to your website that can take an action on your website. Even though this sounds great, it’s important that you start your SEO campaign by defining how you are going to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
With any SEO campaign, it’s critical that you define exactly what you are going to measure, and how you are going to do it. Each metric that you choose to measure will give you a different view on if your campaign is actually working. In my experience, measure each metric that you use for a couple of weeks to check if it’s working. SEO is not a short term process. Find below a couple of tips on measuring the success of your SEO campaign.
SEO measurement tips
Organic rankings: Check the organic rankings for the keywords you are targeting. Do this on all the major search engines that you are targeting. An easy way to check if they are working is to create a basic chart that you can monitor monthly to detect any improvements or trends.
Traffic: Measure the amount of quality traffic you are getting to your website from organic search. Separate search engine traffic from referral traffic (social media, PPC, etc).
Traffic keywords: Check how much traffic are generated from your target keywords. Track this daily and monthly for both unique and total visitors.
Indexed status: With SEO, it’s important that you constantly add new pages to your website or blog. Are these pages indexed? Check your indexed status on Google on a monthly basis.
Links: Measure the number of authoritive links to your website on a monthly basis. Also, don’t make the mistake of only measuring the links pointing to your home page. Measure the deep link in your website.
Engagement: Is your SEO campaign sparking any engagement from your target audience? If it does, which content helped with this? Outline this in a spreadsheet to know which content your audience prefer.
Conversions: This is the most important metric you should monitor on a constant basis. Does your organic search traffic result in any conversions? Setup goals so that you can monitor this.
