How to Track and Measure SEO Success in 3 Simple Steps
Digital marketing is a very effective way to attract new and engaged visitors to your website, and to convert them into loyal customers. For it to be truly effective, you need to be able to measure the results.
Following this three step process will help you to track and measure the success of your SEO strategy and the ROI of your digital marketing campaign.
Step 1 - Set Effective SEO Goals
It’s impossible to track success if you don't know what it looks like. So the first step is to set goals for your campaign that are measurable, realistic and time-limited. You might choose to set your goals for a month, a quarter or the entire year, or for the duration of a specific digital marketing campaign.
You will probably want to track the ranking of your pages on the major search engines, e.g. Google, and most people will set goals relating to the number of visitors who are brought to the website through SEO. This is the simplest way to see if your SEO efforts have been successful.
There are a number of other SEO metrics too that can help you to keep track of your site’s progress, including engagement metrics which measures the time that your visitors spend on a specific page, and the number of pages they view during their visit. The aim should be to keep your visitors engaged on your site for as long as possible - the longer you can keep your visitors on your site, the more likely they are to convert.
Tracking scroll depth can provide useful information about your site visitors’ interaction with your site - it reveals if visitors are seeing the important content on a page, e.g. signup forms, contact information, and product pricing.
Setting effective SEO goals in connection with the desired actions to be taken by your visitors will reveal your conversion rate which will, in turn, enable you to calculate the ROI on your SEO campaign.
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Step 2 - Measure your Statistics
You can track many statistics through Google's free suite of tools, including Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Google Search Console enables you to monitor keywords that your content is ranking for, the position that it appears in the search engine rankings, and the number of impressions and clicks that each page receives.
Google Analytics can be used to set up goals for the objectives you identified in Step 1. For instance, if your objective is for visitors to click through to a second page, you can set this up as a goal and see the results in your reports.
It’s also possible to use Google Analytics to monitor Scroll Depth and Time on Page to reveal how engaged your visitors are once they arrive on your site. If they are bouncing back to the search engine results page you can tweak your campaign until you attain the desired results.
Step 3 - Assess and Make Changes
Use the information attained through Steps 1 and 2 to assess the results of your digital marketing campaign and to make any necessary adjustments, e.g. add new keywords to existing content to generate additional traffic, move important content higher up the page so that your visitors see it sooner.
Search Engine Optimisation is a continual process so once you’ve made the necessary changes, you can set new SEO goals for the next period.
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