How to know SEO is working

SEO

One of my favourite phrases is: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and yet expecting different results.” I think it’s probably one of my favourites because it is so true! Measuring results is one of the most important things we do in nearly all aspects of life, it’s how we know whether something is working properly or not. 

From infancy we have our progress measured in all manner of ways: from how much weight we gain week by week as a baby, through to exam results, job offers, pay rises, promotions etc. And if what we are doing isn’t working, if it’s not getting the right results…we know we need to do something differently. 

Marketing of any kind is exactly the same. We gauge the success of our endeavours by measuring the difference between where we were when we started versus where we ended up after our marketing campaign takes effect (or doesn’t as the case may be). 

In this piece, we will lay out what metrics you can measure, what your key performance indicators are and how to track them. We’ll also discuss how your industry might impact your SEO results.

What metrics can you measure? 

There are many KPIs we can use to measure the success of an SEO campaign. I tend to think of them like one of those fancy falling domino patterns you see so much of on social media (although how anyone has the time to set up those elaborate patterns is beyond me). One domino will fall and lead to another one falling and before you know it, multiple domino lines are involved to bring the beautiful, elaborate picture together as a whole. 

So let’s look at some of these “domino” metrics in turn. 

1. You are ranking better for your chosen keywords.

This metric is the simplest to check and one of the first indicators that your SEO efforts are having an effect. You simply check the keywords that you want your website (or webpage) to rank for in Google. Do this before you begin any kind of SEO work and then continue to monitor where your site or page ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPs) on a regular basis. 

You can do this manually by simply typing the keywords into Google and keeping a results spreadsheet, but there are some great tools available to help you with this too. 

Google Search Console is free to use as is Ahref’s Keyword Generator tool. 

Google Search Console can also help you keep track of improvements in your average keyword positions for any URL for a range of different time periods, from the last week to over a year. 

2. Total Impressions are increasing

Impressions kind of fall between keywords and an actual increase in organic traffic to your site or page. An impression means that a person has seen (or potentially seen) a link to your site, even if they don’t click on it. It’s usually counted as an impression whenever an item appears on any page of the search results, even if it isn’t scrolled into view. 

Again, Google Search Console is your friend here and can track a rise in total impressions across any time frame. A significant rise in impressions is another good indicator that your SEO is working. 

3. Traffic is increasing

Most of us hate the word traffic when it refers to our daily commute, but there is one time when heavy traffic is a good thing, and that’s when it comes to increased traffic to your website! 

This is like the start of the really pretty pattern that those other falling dominos (keywords and impressions) were leading up to. Ultimately, while an increase in keyword rankings and total impressions are great signs, they aren’t much good if they don’t result in an increase in the number of people clicking through to your site from organic search results. 

Google Analytics can help you keep track of this key KPI for your website, by providing you with a traffic report for a generic or customised time period. It will also allow you to compare this with a previous period before your SEO campaign began. This tool not only keeps track of traffic from organic search (which is the most important metric for SEO), but can also show you traffic from other channels too, like social media and email. 

Depending on how your campaign is structured and what your backlinks are like, some of these channels can be indicative of SEO success as well. 

5. More of your URLs get indexed

Here is where our dominos run into some spiders…Google spiders to be exact. Google spiders find your site via links. They cannot discover its existence without them and they can’t index what they can’t see. 

However, even once they find your site, they need to be able to understand it to index it properly. They are only going to spend so much time trying to do this, so one key aspect of technical SEO is making sure it is simple and error-free. It needs to be clear to spiders which URLs they should be crawling and indexing first, and crucially, making it easy for them to do so. 

Again, the best way to track how well your site is being indexed is via Google Search Console. In the Coverage tab, you can see which URLs (pages) on your site have been discovered and/or indexed by Google. Likewise, it will show you which ones have been excluded and why. 

If your SEO strategy is working properly, you should see the list of indexed pages rise dramatically and the list of errors correspondingly reduced. 

The more of your site that gets accurately indexed, the more likely you are to climb up the search engine results pages. Our domino patterns sometimes loop back around in circles. 

6. A change in average engagement time

Now, this one is controversial. Search engines, particularly Google, have moved away slightly from the idea that if a client is spending a really long time on a website, then the website must be a good one. After all, if you want to find out the answer to a question and have to scroll through dozens of pages to find it, then the user experience of that site is very poor. 

But, exiting a page too quickly can suggest that the information is not grabbing the client, particularly if you’ve designed that page to really warm them up towards a sale. 

So, although this metric needs to be used in conjunction with other metrics to determine whether your campaign has “moved the dial”. If you’ve changed something and there’s a bit of change in engagement time, then take notice… you’ve done something that made a difference. Whether that difference is good or bad is ultimately up to the following and final metric we’re going to look at:

You need your site to be a lean mean, lead-generating machine. And if it’s not doing that, then it’s worthless. 

How do you know? Look at the data 

If your traffic isn’t increasing, if your website isn’t being ranked for keywords that you know leads are using, and if there is no increase in conversions, then you will know that your strategy isn’t working. Because there is almost always a lag time between action and results in the world of SEO, it can be disheartening if things don’t move quickly. It can take as long as 6 months to see any change if you’re niche is highly competitive, and even then the changes might be incremental. 

So, whatever metric you’re looking at, compare it with the same period last quarter or last year. This long-term approach will give you more insight into whether the changes you are making are having any impact on your website’s performance.