How to Measure Success in SEO

Have you been frustrated at a lack of results from your SEO efforts? Many times, this frustration comes from a place of confusion or a lack of understanding what exactly is going on with the campaign. At Firestarter, we believe that when performance is measured, performance improves. So how can you as a business owner measure the success of your SEO campaign?

Metrics

SEO can be an extremely powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. Unfortunately, SEO companies are notorious for hiding behind the veil of secrecy when it comes to their reporting. They provide obscure metrics and data points that only confuse, not clarify. As a business owner, how do you strip that all away and identify what metrics actually matter? We’ve been there, and as such we’ve identified 4 key metrics to monitor in measuring your SEO success: Links, Rankings, Traffic, and Leads.

Links

As such a major ranking factor, it’s almost comical how rarely link building efforts are measured and reported.  Links serve as the lifeblood of an SEO campaign, so measuring a website’s link profile is crucial. Key metrics to look for are the monthly acquisition of new links, domain authority (or a similar metric since Moz isn’t universally used), and linking domains. By identifying how these numbers change, you can quickly see how effective your SEO campaign is at increasing online visibility. Tools to measure these numbers include Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, etc.

Rankings

These represent the most fundamental reporting metric in the SEO industry. If a company doesn’t provide rank tracking & reporting, it’s probably time to look for a new provider. These reports should identify the keywords currently being targeted in a campaign, where they rank on the SERPs, and how they have changed over time. Other important metrics could include local rankings (like map results) and how the keyword ranks on other search engines. One thing to pay attention to is the type of keyword being tracked. The keywords should be relevant, filled with intent (specific phrases like “Denver Mortgage Broker” as opposed to vague categories like “Mortgage”) and also have search volume.

Traffic

As your link building numbers increase, rankings will follow. With a jump in your rankings, you should also see growth in another key metric: traffic. This represents the number of people actually coming to your website. By reviewing Google Analytics, actionable insights can be gained with numbers like Organic Visits, Time on Page, and Bounce Rate.

Leads

At the end of the day, the real reason you’re doing SEO is to grow your business and get more customers. Tracking the leads you receive through the website will be the crowning number to pay attention to. Leads look different for every business, but can generally be looped into two main actions: Form Fillouts/Orders & Calls received. Other metrics could include which gated content has been downloaded, if someone clicked on the map to get directions to the store, etc.

In measuring the progress of your link metrics, rankings, traffic, and leads, you will finally have the clarity you need to measure how successful your SEO campaign has been. For more information, contact one of our experts today!