How to Measure Effectiveness of Your SEO Campaign

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), it is important to make sure that the time and money you are investing in your campaign are helping you achieve your business goals.

Whether you are noticing an increase in web traffic or a sudden drop in conversion rates, the reasons for these changes are often complicated. For marketers, key performance metrics provide insights into how their SEO campaign is performing. These metrics tell you how your target customers perceive your website and whether they like it or not. These metrics also give us credibility within our organization by demonstrating that SEO is both a powerful and worthwhile investment. In order to measure and improve your SEO efforts, you need to know which key metrics to track.

Here are three key performance metrics that you should track when measuring the success of your SEO campaign:

1. Organic Ranking

According to studies, websites that appear on the first two pages of Google search results receive up to 92 percent of the total web traffic. Search engine ranking is one of the easiest ways to know if your SEO campaign is working well. Organic ranking refers to your website’s ranking in search engine results. One of the objectives of an SEO campaign is to improve the visibility and search engine ranking of your website to potential customers. Businesses listed on the first two pages of search engine results have more credibility in the minds of potential customers.

The best way to rank high is to include relevant keywords that you want potential customers to use when searching for your brand name and products. If your website does not rank high for the specific keywords, you may need to optimize them further. You must be careful to choose keywords that will not only help you rank high but will also drive targeted traffic to your website.

However, with search engine algorithms evolving all the time, we cannot focus solely on rankings. Rankings are only a base measure to see how the SEO campaign is performing overall. If you notice a significant drop in rankings, that may indicate a problem with the website.

2. Traffic

This term refers to the amount of traffic being applied to your site through search engines like Google. This number can give you a definite indication of how effective your SEO campaign is at optimizing your web content. When tracking the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, you should consider both the volume and quality of your website traffic. The best way of monitoring traffic volume is by considering the total number of organic searches received from search results. A successful SEO campaign will increase the number of organic visitors flocking your website.

Three metrics commonly used to measure the quality of web traffic are average visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate. If the average visit duration and pages per visit metrics are low and the bounce rate metric is high, you need to review your SEO strategies.

While search engine rankings can be a reliable performance indicator, they are pointless if they fail to draw targeted traffic to your business website. SEO, when implemented correctly, can increase both new and repeat visitors to your website.

3. Conversion Rate

Healthy traffic volume is great, but what we really want is traffic that converts.

The conversion rate is the percentage of total visitors arriving at your website through search engine results. These visitors perform the desired action, for instance, buy your product or service, fill out the contact form or sign up for a subscription. The conversion rate is the ultimate measure of the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. The higher the conversion rate, the more successful your SEO is.

According to experts, conversion rates vary from industry to industry, but they are usually in the range of 2 percent to 3 percent. Having said that, you must aim for a conversion rate of 5 percent, or higher, if you are creating specific landing pages for your target audiences.

If you do not track and analyze metrics, you will never know what SEO strategies work for your business.

If you do not measure how effective your SEO campaign is, you could end up spending tons of money on a strategy that has a weak return. Tracking key metrics is not easy, but it is essential.