How do you Know your SEO Strategy is Working – here’s How!
To gauge whether an SEO strategy has been successful, it requires one to know where to look to measure. The most obvious answer regarding how you know whether an SEO strategy is working is in how much activity your site is generating. That said, it’s not always easy to tell whether a strategy is reaching its full potential or whether there is something else happening.
There are four key areas that you want to measure to see whether a strategy is responsible for a site’s success, including the most important of which is the amount of traffic. Cite Google organic traffic to get these numbers. Ideally, you want to separate between any organic traffic and paid search advertising traffic that may be ongoing. Areas of the site to see traffic numbers are main pages, category pages, and specific blog postings. By targeting specific areas, you should be able to narrow in on where efforts are working.
Next in line on what to look for to determine whether a strategy has been successful or not is in a page’s SEO ranking. Though this metric is highly flawed due to the number of variables involved, there are trends in SEO ranking that could indicate quite clearly whether a strategy is working. For example, grouping keywords together to measure their position over time is worthy of consideration. Determining whether a page ranking for a specific keyword is consistent or fluctuating is something else to look at.
Thirdly, there’s customer engagement. This can admittedly be measured in any number of ways, such as comments, likes, shares, sales, etc. It’s in large part up to the marketer or site owner to decide how they wish to measure customer engagement. Ultimately, it should come down to what action you want a user to take. Should you want the visitor to stay on your site and read pages of content, ‘page views per session’ is something be attentive to. If the goal is for the customer to make a purchase, measuring customer engagement by sales is recommended.
Lastly, there’s revenue or leads generated. Any SEO strategy is a financial investment that, when done successfully, can pay for itself by generating strong leads and revenues. Though many of us can get caught up on lead tracking, revenues is another metric that can be used to determine where your search engine optimization approach is working.
Remember, if you don’t know what the purpose of your SEO strategy is or how to measure it, you will never be sure if your time, effort, and financial investment was worth it. These areas of metrics is just where you may want to start. There are numerous others you may want to check out, again, depending on what the final goal is with your campaign.
As Toronto SEO experts, Unlimited Exposure has proven we know how to develop and implement a successful SEO campaign. We know what to watch out, what to avoid, and can help any site generate real results in revenue, sales, and conversion. If you aren’t already measuring your SEO campaign, we would love to discuss with you possible options moving forward, and how to target short-term and long-term SEO success. Contact Unlimited Exposure today to speak with a representative and find out how we can help your SEO strategy!