I know you are here because you want to invest in an SEO marketing campaign or you have invested but you want to know how you track the success of your SEO campaign.
SEO campaign success can be tracked in so many ways, but in this article, I will mention few ways you can track the success of your SEO campaign and the tools you can use to track your success.
Meanwhile, before we dive deeper into how you can track your website SEO success.
Let’s start with the definition of SEO for those who might be new to the term.
Search engine optimization otherwise known as SEO is an organic online advertising method of improving your website ranking in the search engine so that your potential customers will find it easy to know about your business and buy from you.
You need to know that SEO has many benefits it can do to businesses, but these benefits don’t happen right away.
SEO doesn’t deliver fast marketing results like most business owners expected it to deliver.
So, if you are among the business owners that have invested in an SEO campaign, you will likely want to know how much time it will take for your SEO investment to start bringing in results for you.
Don’t forget that SEO marketing is among the types of online advertisement and one of the advantages of online advertisement is that it is measurable.
There are lots of analytics tools that you can use to measure the success of your online marketing campaigns.
The 3 best analytics tools that you can use to measure the success of your SEO campaign.
You will need to make use of website analytics tools to gather your website data If you want to know the success your website has achieved after investing in SEO marketing.
Although, there is no exact way you can use to tell if your SEO campaign is working or not, but the analytics tools I am about to mention below will help you to determine if your SEO effort is working toward your desired results.
According to marketing experts, google analytics is one of the best analytics tools you can use to gain insights into your website data.
It provides lots of website data that will help you determine how well your website has been performing for a certain period of time.
Apart from tracking your website traffic, google analytics can also give you an insight into how long your potential customers spent on your website.
Which phone they use to access your website, the country they are accessing your website from and so much more.
SEMRush is another important all-in-one SEO tool that offers crucial insight into your SEO campaign.
SEMrush track website data like organic search traffic, paid search traffic (PPC Traffic), the number of backlinks that are pointing to your website from third-party websites and so much more.
The data provided by SEMRush will make it easy for you to conclude whether your SEO campaign is heading for success or it is not having a positive impact on your website.
For example, your SEO goal might be to increase the number of backlinks your website earns from third-party websites.
If you see that your website backlinks have increased after using SEMrush to analyze your website data, this means that your SEO efforts are delivering positive results to your website.
If you are targeting the right keywords and using them excellently in your web content, you will also notice an increase in your website organic traffic, this means that you are optimizing your web content in the right way.
Another analytics tool on my list is Ahrefs. You can use ahrefs to track your website keyword ranking by incorporating your target keywords into your web content.
Ahref is a priceless SEO analytics tool that can be used to track your website's keyword ranking.
Important website metrics that determine the success of your SEO campaign
There are many marketing metrics that can be measured, but there are few marketing metrics that you need to measure which will determine how effective your SEO effort is performing.
These metrics or your marketing key performance indicators otherwise known as KPIs are metrics that reflect the overall success of your website SEO campaign.
You can use the google analytics tool to measure your SEO campaign metrics or key performance indicators (KPI).
Summarily if you want to know if your SEO campaign is delivering positive results, you need to know that:
1. Website Traffic
Getting quality traffic from your target customers is the number one SEO goal, so to be plain and blunt, your SEO efforts are not working if your website is yet to generate traffic after you have invested in SEO marketing.
Let me take you back to the definition of SEO so that you can know why traffic is important for the success of SEO marketing.
Search engine optimization (SEO) job is to optimize your website in order to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), which then generates organic traffic to you.
The increase in your website spot on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords is proof that you are following the best SEO practice.
The impression that your website generates doesn’t directly have a positive impact that it adds to your website ranking, but the click-through rate that your website gets from the impression is what has an impact on your website.
The traffic generated by a website and its page rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs) complement one another.
Your website traffic will affect your page click-through rate which will help you to earn the top spot.
2. Website Visitors Session
The amount of time your potential customers used on your website is also an important metric that will determine the success of your SEO campaign.
If you want to know if your SEO effort is effective you need to be aware of the average time your potential customers are spending on your website.
With the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to measure the average time online users stay on your web page.
It is likely that you have a low time on the page before you decide to invest in SEO marketing.
The reason behind this can be that your website is full of low-quality content that doesn’t add value to your potential customers so they left for your competitors with a more informative website.
One of the most important factors of effective SEO marketing is the creation of Quality content.
When your website is full of quality content you will notice an increase in the time your potential customers spend on your website.
When you publish content that are valuable to your potential customers, you will definitely increase the time that they spend on your web page because your content is informative.
The longer your potential customers stay on your web page, the higher you will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) because search engine giant like Google will see your website to be a helpful website that provides valuable content to online users
3. Web Page Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of online users that left your website without visiting more than one page.
This usually happens when online users can’t find the answer to look what they are looking for in your website. So they exit to visit another website.
With Google Analytics you can view your website bounce rate.
If it is high then you need to troubleshoot your web pages and fix the issues.
Low website bounce rate means you are doing the right thing and online users love to interact with your website.
4. Conversion rate
Higher conversion rate is what makes business owners smile because website conversion rate is unarguably the most exciting metric to notice its increase.
An increase in website conversion rate is one of the main goals of running an SEO campaign>
What I meant is that, if you see that your website conversions are increasing this means that your SEO effort is effective.
An increase in your website conversion rate is the combination of different SEO strategies that work together to help increase the organic traffic of your website.
It also increases many things like:
Why is it hard to determine the progress of an SEO campaign?
SEO success can be attached to many factors, but when it comes to the reasons why it is hard to determine the progress of an SEO campaign, there are three main factors that are involved.
These three factors are completely out of your control so you have to keep optimizing your website to keep up with the latest changes so that you can succeed.
1. Search Engine Frequent Algorithm changes.
In order to provide the best experience for online users, google frequently updates its search engine algorithm.
These algorithm changes are completely out of your control, yet it happens frequently so that search engine can provide the best results to online users.
In order for you to understand search engine frequent algorithm changes you can read the list of Google search ranking updates from search central
With these algorithm changes, you will notice lots of changes in your website SEO results, but the algorithm changes that mostly affect website SEO results are core search engine algorithms.
Algorithm changes that are not core changes don’t affect websites frequently like core algorithm changes.
These algorithm changes that are not core changes target websites that follow black hat SEO techniques to gain an edge over websites that follows white hat SEO techniques.
The best way to handle algorithm changes is to follow modern SEO guidelines as closely as you can so you minimize the chance of being hurt by an update and maximize the chance of being helped.
2. Industry Competition
Business competition is another thing that affects the progress of your SEO campaign.
Unless you are the only one running your type of business, your business will also have some competitors that are also trying to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Your competitors are also trying to rank the keywords you want to rank for, they also want to earn the top spot for their target keywords, and doing this will make it harder for you to also earn the top spot.
Your website ranking and growth will drop if your competitors are frequently optimizing their website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), so you also need to be optimizing your website frequently if you want to outrank your competitors in search engine results.
3. Online User's Behavior
The results you get from your efforts have a lot to do with the way online users perform their search queries.
The reason why some website has higher ranking than other websites on the search engine is because Google ranks the website that provides the best answer to online users’ query.
Websites that provide the best informational content to online users are ranked higher than websites that provide low-quality content.
What this means is that if there is any fluctuation in the behavior of online users, it will definitely affect website SEO results.