How to Measure SEO Performance
Measuring SEO Campaign effectiveness can help you gauge the accuracy of your campaign and collect data to improve its performance over time. There are three key indicators that should be considered when measuring SEO performance: rankings, traffic, and conversions.
Rankings
Keyword rankings are crucial to a successful SEO campaign. Studies show sites that get the most traffic are the ones that appear on the first page of Google. Therefore, tracking keyword rankings over time allows you to adjust your SEO strategy around keywords that require the most attention and will provide the most benefit to your campaign. For example, if you are tracking 20 keywords, but five of them do not appear on the first page, you should adjust your strategy to focus on optimizing those five words. Without tracking keyword rankings data, you cannot make informed strategic decisions.
Traffic
Traffic volume should be measured based on the number of visits that come organically from searches. A successful SEO strategy should yield an increase in organic search traffic over time. However, it’s also important to measure the quality of traffic. There are three criteria to look at when assessing the quality of traffic to your site: pages per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rate. If all three of the criteria are low, you may have discovered either a problem with your website or with the traffic your keywords are delivering. It’s important to understand the relationship between the keywords your campaign is targeting and the traffic it’s delivering.
Conversions
Conversions are defined based on your specific campaign goals. It’s important to remember not all visitors to your site are ready to buy, but neglecting to count the actions of those visitors is a mistake. Conversions can count as newsletter subscriptions, social shares, whitepaper downloads, and other actions visitors take that would indicate they’re interested in what you offer. Tracking these types of conversions is a great traffic quality indicator. Likewise, you should have a system in place to track the monetary value of conversions to determine the ROI of your SEO campaign.
Tracking your SEO campaign’s performance can give you actionable data to help you make the right decisions to ensure future success. For more help and tips for tracking your SEO performance, contact our team at
