Measuring SEO Success: How Do You Know Your Strategy is a Hit or Miss?

In business, ROI is an important consideration. How well of a return do you get for your investment of resources – time, talent and money? Knowing how successful you are and how much ROI you are getting  out of your SEO strategy and implementation will help you decide whether to add more resources or channel these resources to another direction.

Here are some considerations regarding measuring SEO success:

• Ask: “What do you want to achieve through your website?” Your website is not simply an item in your company to-do list that you need to tick off. A website should have clearly stated goals at the onset. Is it sales? Is it developing your brand and increasing brand recognition? Will it be developing leads? Understanding your website’s goals will help you identify what kind of readers and traffic you want, and thus, at what extent you are successful in reaching them.
• It is not just organic traffic. Unless your goal is to simply sell advertising space on the website, organic traffic is not the only thing you should measure. Organic traffic is concerned about how many readers are going into your website. The temptation is to simply use the increase or decrease of your traffic to indicate whether your SEO strategy is a success is not. However, the fact that more people are going into your website does not mean that more people end up buying your product or build a relationship with you. Yes, you want organic traffic but only to the extent that it means that the more people visiting your site, the higher the possibility that more people will end up becoming a customer.
• Understand the difference and relationship between branded and non-branded search. If a user searches the Internet specifically for your brand or for a particular brand, this may be attributed to other factors and efforts, other than SEO. For instance, a recently aired TV commercial can increase awareness for your brand and that resulted in a surge in brand-specific searches. To better measure the success of your SEO efforts, focus on the non-branded search queries. This will point you towards how your SEO activities have  made it easier for people who are searching for a product or service to find you. Of course, you also need to remember that branded and non-branded search can be related. The increase in branded search may be because people have performed a non-branded search and this resulted in an increase in awareness for your brand.
• Look at metrics that show engagement. Do website visitors engage with your website content? That is, do they stay to read, complete a form or share your content? Do they move on to other pages within the website? Engagement is also a metric that search engines look at. Your website’s bounce rate, pages per visit and duration per visit will have an effect on your SEO results. Website engagement will indicate how successful you are at keeping relevant and noteworthy or interesting to your readers. Low engagement indicators may point out that you have not been regularly updating your content or your content is not interesting enough to interest your readers. There are tools that can help you filter out the results based on search query to help you identify which queries are most effective.
• Use local and global search results. Is your business concentrated on a certain location? Or do you have need to build a global market? If you are a business with more local than global concerns, then focus on your SEO results for your local and target markets.
• Craft your calls to action carefully. Ultimately, getting to do what you want your visitors to do is one good way of measuring engagement. This can be getting them to sign up for a free gift, subscribing to your newsletter or buying from your website. Using effectively calls to action can help you see how your SEO activities are affecting your sales.

About Adaptivity Pro

Let Adaptivity Pro help you formulate an SEO strategy and measure its effectiveness. Adaptivity Pro is your Utah SEO expert, with a team of seasoned SEO specialists, analysts and writers to help you plan and implement the SEO that best fits your company’s goals. We also provide Utah website design and Internet marketing services.