Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for driving traffic to your website, but how do you know if your SEO efforts are actually working? Measuring and tracking your SEO results is key to understanding its effectiveness and making data-driven decisions about your strategy.
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the key metrics you should be looking at to measure your SEO results and determine the success of your SEO campaigns. By regularly monitoring these SEO KPIs (key performance indicators), you can gain valuable insights into how your site is performing in search and what steps you can take to improve.
Why Should You Track & Measure Your SEO Results?
If you’re making use of an SEO agency, you are probably spending thousands every month optimizing your website for SEO. As a business owner, you should track your SEO results to make sure that your SEO is working and that your website is increasing in organic search traffic.
Here are some key reasons why you should measure and track SEO results:
- Evaluate the effectiveness of efforts – Tracking SEO metrics over time lets you see what strategies are working or not working to improve rankings, traffic, and conversions. This allows you to optimize efforts.
- Identify issues/opportunities – Detailed data can reveal specific weak points like technical problems, target keywords losing rankings, traffic drops from a source, etc. You can then take targeted action to improve.
- Inform strategy and planning – Analytics provide insights to shape your SEO roadmap. You can set data-driven goals, priorities, and budgets.
- Benchmark progress – Comparing SEO data week-over-week or month-over-month highlights trends and progress. You can see the impact of changes.
- Connect SEO to business value – By linking rankings/traffic to conversions, you can quantify SEO ROI and show the value it brings to your business goals.
- Reporting to stakeholders – Hard metrics tied to business KPIs make a data-backed case for the importance of SEO and demonstrate progress.
- Identify new opportunities – Emerging trends in your data can reveal valuable untapped keywords, high-converting traffic sources, new conversions opportunities, etc.
- Optimize budget – Analytics helps allocate budget efficiently to high-impact activities.
Measuring your SEO results provides the visibility and insights needed to optimize efforts, connect SEO to business growth, and gain maximum ROI from your investment.
What Type Of SEO Results Can Be Tracked And Measured?
The most important SEO results you want to track are:
- Rankings – Track ranking positions for target keywords in search engines like Google. Monitor top rankings, first page rankings, ranking fluctuations, etc.
- Organic traffic – Measure visits coming from organic search. Track overall organic traffic as well as traffic for target keywords.
- Click-through rate (CTR) – Calculate CTR from rankings by comparing clicks/impressions. Aim for CTR improvement.
- Indexing – Check indexing status in search engines to ensure new pages are being added and can rank.
- Page speed – Page load times and performance affect SEO so measure speed metrics like Time to Interactive.
- Local SEO – For local businesses, track rankings and metrics for location-optimized keywords and content.
How To Track Keyword Rankings?
Here are some effective ways to track your keyword rankings:
- Use Google Search Console – Connect your site to Search Console to see keyword ranking data directly in Google. You can view current rankings and historical performance.
- Rank tracking software – Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz allow you to monitor keyword rankings from top search engines. They provide ranking reports over time.
- Manual searches – Do periodic manual spot checks for your most important target keywords. Search for your keywords and note your site’s ranking position.
- Ranking proxies – Websites like SERPstat show Google search results without personalization so you can check rankings anonymously.
- Google Analytics – Link your Search Console data to see rankings driving traffic and conversions in Analytics.
- Spreadsheet tracking – Create a spreadsheet and manually log weekly or monthly rankings for consistency.
- Mobile rankings – Search on mobile to check rankings from mobile devices and track them separately.
- Schedule reports – Use rank tracking tools that allow you to schedule and automate ranking reports for ease of tracking.
The key is to be consistent in tracking rankings across keywords and search engines. Analyze ranking data to optimize your SEO strategy and focus on the highest potential keywords.
Should I Be Tracking My Website Conversions?
Yes, tracking conversions is very important for measuring the success of your SEO efforts. Here are some key reasons why you should track conversions:
- Quantify SEO value – Conversions allow you to directly connect your SEO traffic to business results like leads, sales, subscriptions, etc. This shows the revenue/ROI being driven by SEO.
- Identify profitable keywords/traffic – Seeing which keywords or referral sources drive the most conversions highlights the best SEO opportunities to focus on.
- Optimize landing pages – Lower conversion rates on some landing pages may indicate issues to fix like slow load times, confusing copy, poor layouts, etc.
- Set optimization priorities – Knowing which pages or keywords convert best informs where to focus optimization time and resources.
- Benchmark goals – You can set SEO conversion goals and evaluate progress over time as you work to improve.
- Reporting to stakeholders – Conversion metrics directly connect SEO efforts to key business KPIs, which is great for demonstrating value.
- Enhance user experience – Boosting conversion rates improves the customer journey and overall user experience.
- Compare to competitors – If competitors have higher conversion rates for shared keywords, it may indicate their better page experience.
In short, conversion tracking is crucial for maximizing SEO value and aligning efforts to business goals. The data provides insights to continuously improve results.
If you’re not sure how to set up conversion tracking on your website you can always get in touch with a professional SEO company like Webluno that offers several SEO pricing packages that offer conversion tracking & monthly SEO reports.
Conclusion To Measuring Your SEO Results
Regularly tracking SEO metrics is crucial to evaluate efforts, identify issues, inform strategy, and demonstrate ROI. Key metrics to analyze include:
- Rankings – Track keyword positions to optimize visibility.
- Traffic – Measure overall and keyword-level search traffic.
- Click-through rate – Monitor CTR to improve click appeal.
- Conversions – Connect SEO to business goals with conversion tracking.
- Indexing – Check index status to ensure new content can rank.
- Page speed – Faster speeds improve rankings.
- Links – Track links as a ranking factor.
Analyzing multiple metrics provides complete insights to optimize efforts. Consistent measurement enables data-driven decisions to boost SEO results.
