How Do You Know If Your SEO Efforts Are Working?

Measuring your SEO success is critical to understanding your efforts' impact and ensuring you're on the right track. Here are some tips for measuring your SEO success. To rank higher in search engine results, brands must create consistent, high-quality SEO content that keeps customers coming back, and that means measuring their progress and adjusting their strategy if necessary.

Set Clear SEO Goals

The first step in measuring your SEO success is to set clear goals. What do you want to achieve with your SEO efforts? Do you want to increase organic traffic, improve rankings, or generate more leads? Once you have a clear goal, measuring progress and determining whether your efforts are paying off will be easier.

Track Key Performance Indicators

Once you have set clear goals, it's time to track key performance indicators (KPIs). These are the metrics that will help you measure the success of your SEO efforts. Some common KPIs include:

Keyword Rankings

While designing your SEO strategy, you conducted keyword research and selected the most suitable keywords to target for your specific audience. Conduct a Google search of the relevant keywords to determine your website's ranking. The search engine results will choose your site's ranking in relation to your competitors.

The objective is to rank on the first page, which provides the highest potential for generating organic traffic to your website. If utilizing SEO tools, such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz, it is advised to track keyword rankings to assess any changes in ranking progression.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is a term used to describe the number of website visitors who arrive through search engine results. It is one of the most critical metrics for measuring SEO results because the number represents all the visitors your site attracts solely from organic search. It is a measure of how well the content on your site aligns with visitors' search queries.

Traffic Quality

Increasing organic traffic over time is terrific but may only be relevant if you attract target visitors. In addition to measuring the organic traffic quantity, it is a good idea also to measure traffic quality. Measuring the quality of traffic is trickier as it requires more careful analysis. To calculate the rate of traffic, pay attention to your visitor activity. Are they viewing several pages? Are they taking action like signing up for your newsletter, downloading content, or completing your forms? How much time are they spending on your pages? If visitors are spending a little bit of time on your site and aren't taking any action with you, likely, you aren't attracting your target visitors, which means you aren't a fit for them, and they aren't a fit for you. 

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The CTR is the percentage of visitors that clicked on your website link when they searched a term to the number of people who saw the link. Only some people that search for a term and visit your site at the top of their results will of course click through to your site. But if your site provides users the information they are searching for, your CTR will increase consistently.

Bounce Rate

Have you ever walked into a store and immediately walked out because the experience or what the store offered wasn't what you expected? That is precisely what the bounce rate measures - the visitors who land on your site immediately leave or bounce because they realize you aren't the answer to their search or query. These visitors come and go without interacting with your content— the lower the bounce rate, the better. 

Time Spent on Page

Once visitors get to your site, what do they do? The more time they spend on your site means they consume more of your content, and their interest is likely high, making them a good target visitor. You want visitors to spend as much time on your pages and visit multiple pages. A low time spent on the page means visitors are likely not finding your content engaging - nothing is catching their eye and drawing them in, but they stick around longer than a bounce in hopes that you address their search query need. If your content strategy attracts your target visitors and keeps them engaged for more time, your plan is proving effective. 

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate measures the number of visitors that take action on your website. Conversions are easily calculated by the number of forms completed, sign-ups, or sales if you host an eCommerce site. You can use Google Analytics to track website results. In that case, you can designate conversions for any significant actions you want users to take, including visiting a specific page or downloading content.

Domain Authority

What frequency does your domain appear in search results for users compared to your competitors? Domain authority is a metric that estimates how frequently your website will appear in search results for relevant keywords. A higher keyword ranking correlates with higher domain authority. 

SEMrush is a tool that helps you calculate your Authority Score based on a point scale of 1 to 100, and a higher number means more traffic for you and a better overall ranking. The metric is an excellent way to compare yourself to competitors, and you can anticipate that lower scores will likely result in lower traffic and orders. However, search engines don't rely on domain authority to rank sites. To gauge your domain authority, remember that scores between 40 and 50 are considered average, those between 50 and 60 are rated as good, and scores above 60 are rated as excellent. If you are new, your website starts with an authority score of 1 - it can only go up from there!

Analyze Your Competitors

It's also essential to analyze what your competitors are doing regarding SEO. Take a look at their website content and see what keywords they're targeting. You can also use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to get an idea of their backlink profile and keyword rankings. This will give you valuable insights into their strategies and how successful they've been with them. You can also search on the top keywords you are trying to optimize for to see who comes up and determine how your known competition is doing, or you uncover new competitors ranking high in results that you hadn't been tracking. 

Use Tools to Monitor Progress

Now that you know what metrics to track, you need a system and tools to help you consistently collect and track your performance. Google Analytics and Search Console are great (free) tools for tracking website performance and monitoring progress over time. They can provide valuable insights into your site's user behavior and which keywords are driving the most organic traffic. Other tools, such as Moz Pro, SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Screaming Frog, can help with SEO technical aspects such as crawlability and indexation issues.

Test Different Strategies

Don’t be afraid to test different strategies when it comes to SEO. Experiment with keywords, content formats, link-building tactics, etc., and see which works best for your business goals. This will help you optimize your strategy over time and ensure you're getting the most out of every effort you make toward improving search engine visibility for your business or brand.

Take Action on your Results

By tracking these critical metrics and following these tips, you should measure the success of your SEO efforts more effectively and ensure they're having the desired impact on organic search results for your business or brand. Getting your system and tools to track your metrics is the start of improving your SEO. Understanding what the metrics tell you and taking action to improve where you don't see the results you are driving is necessary to improve your search ranking to generate more quality traffic leading to more sales.