If you want to increase your business’s online visibility, it’s essential to run SEO campaigns. By optimizing content, website architecture, and linking strategies, you can improve your rankings on search engines like Google and Bing. With the right SEO campaign, you will attract potential clients and customers actively searching for your products or services. Ultimately, SEO will improve website traffic and lead generation, resulting in more qualified leads and better financial outcomes for your company. But not all SEO campaigns are created equal, and tracking SEO performance is essential to ensure your efforts are paying off. Keep reading to learn my best SEO tracking tips and key metrics to measure success in search optimization.
How to Measure SEO Success
Knowing how to measure SEO performance is key to understanding how best to improve your strategy. But with so many metrics to track, where do you even begin? The answer depends on what your goals are. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, tracking keyword rankings and organic clicks can help show progress. But if conversions are what matter most, focusing on improvements in click-through rate (CTR) could be the most effective way forward. In any case, it's essential to establish a baseline with actual data so you can better track progress over time as you refine your SEO performance.
6 Key SEO Metrics to Measure Success
When it comes to how to measure SEO success, your goals matter. In my experience, most clients want to increase their online visibility, website traffic, and conversions. With those goals in mind, here are six key metrics (in no particular order) to measure for effective SEO tracking.
Website Traffic
Website traffic is an important SEO metric to track because it measures the number of visitors to a website. This metric can help determine the effectiveness of the SEO efforts and inform decisions on content optimization. Knowing the amount of website visitors helps to understand how many potential customers are visiting a website, which is helpful in understanding how successful a website is in driving conversions and sales. Additionally, website traffic can be used to assess the effectiveness of SEO strategies, as well as to identify where improvements are needed.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate measures the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. It reflects the percentage of visitors to your website who actually take the desired action - such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading an ebook. Tracking conversion rate helps you measure the success of your SEO efforts, identify opportunities for improvement, and optimize your content and website for better results.
Backlinks and Referral Traffic
Backlinks are an important SEO metric to track because they are a foundational factor in determining a website's trust score. They act as a vote of confidence that search engines use to determine the relevance and trustworthiness of a website. By tracking backlinks, webmasters can ensure that their website is being linked to from authoritative and relevant sources. This helps to increase the website's visibility and ranking in the search engine results pages.
Referral traffic relates to entrances gained from online profiles and linked mentions from other domains. By tracking your referral traffic, you can determine which websites are sending you visitors and how effective your backlinking strategies are. You can also use referral traffic to identify which websites are referring the most visitors to your website, so you can build relationships and additional referral strategies with them.
Keyword Visibility
Keyword visibility is a key component of search engine optimization campaigns. It refers to how many keyword phrases your business website ranks for on search engines. Optimizing keyword visibility enables your content to rank higher on search engine results pages and reach more potential customers. Incorporating keywords into the text helps search engines understand what the page is about, making it easier for your audience to find what they're looking for.
Keyword Intent is a Crucial Component of Keyword Visibility
However, while it’s great to rank for a large number of terms, understanding keyword intent is essential to driving quality leads to your website. Keyword intent refers to the purpose behind a particular search query. Knowing intent can help you craft more targeted and valuable content for users and rank higher in search results.
For example, someone searching for “where to buy sneakers” has a different intent than someone searching for “best sneaker brands.” The first phrase has a purchase intent–they want to buy sneakers. The second phrase has an informational intent–they want to learn about sneaker brands. Perhaps they’ll want to purchase sneakers once they find a brand they like, but that’s not the current intent.
By prioritizing keyword intent in your SEO campaigns, you can create content that adequately addresses your audiences’ needs organically. And by doing so, you’ll increase visibility in search engine results and improve the relevance of your website.
For more insight on defining keyword intent, checkout my previous article which offers helpful tips for creating a keyword strategy.
Search Engine Rankings
Knowing which landing pages rank for specific keywords is an essential part of SEO tracking. Search rankings measure how well your website or landing page ranks on major search engines against keywords and phrases that match the services or products offered. If you optimize a landing page for a certain keyword and Google ranks that page under a different keyword, it signals that one of two things is happening. Either your landing page relevance is low. Or, you have multiple pages with similar keywords, and Google doesn’t clearly understand which page to rank.
As part of your SEO performance tracking, monitoring your search engine rankings regularly and adjusting techniques accordingly is important. With the right strategy, optimizing your website performance on search engine results pages can help you reach greater heights with your business goals.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is an important metric to track when evaluating the success of an SEO campaign. CTR measures how many times your link was clicked in proportion to the total number of impressions made on a particular web platform, such as a search engine or website. For example, if you have 100 impressions and 10 people click your link, your CTR would be 10%. Understanding CTR is essential for improving any SEO campaign because it provides insights into what's working and why.
With this understanding, you can identify which techniques effectively drive organic traffic to your website and adjust your strategy accordingly. Often, a couple of minor tweaks to the meta title or description can help sites get more clicks for top-ranking keywords and improve SEO performance.
Experience Campaign Setup and SEO Tracking Done for You
It can be challenging to know where to start when setting up a successful SEO campaign and keeping track of the results. Hiring an SEO freelancer is a great option if you want a custom-tailored approach to ensure your website climbs the ranks in search engine results and converts your target audience.
As an SEO freelancer, I can create a solid strategy based on your goals and provide ongoing monitoring of SEO metrics to measure success. With all this handled for you, you can have peace of mind that every optimization effort is working towards increased visibility, leads, and sales for your business. Want to learn more about how I can help your SEO performance soar? Let’s connect and chat about your business’s SEO needs.