Good SEO is crucial for the success of your digital presence. There are a few indicators that tell if your SEO campaign is moving in the right direction. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the cornerstones of digital marketing. SEO makes it possible to measure your marketing efforts in the digital landscape in tangible terms. In today’s tech-savvy, mobile-friendly market, it has become imperative to know where your business stands, and that’s assessed by how your brand’s visibility improves over time. There are numerous SEO tools that digital marketers use to improve ranking on search engine results pages (SERP), to reach more audience and to ensure better conversions. But how do you know if these SEO tools and tricks are actually working?
It isn’t easy for SMEs (and even large brands) to assess their SEO Campaign. It becomes even more difficult if the agency you are working with doesn’t share details as openly as you would desire. However, there are certain measurable attributes using which you can assess the success score of your SEO campaign. Let’s take a look.
Conversions
One of the primary reasons why you engage digital marketers for SEO is to see more traction on your site. This could mean different things for different businesses. For an e-commerce platform, conversions through SEO mean more buyers; for a B2B company it could be filling out lead generation forms by clients. An increase in conversions means an increase in business, and thus revenue.
Conversions basically means sales. An improved conversion rate could be the result of several SEO strategies, such as increase in user time on a page, increase in website traffic and decrease in the bounce rate. So, how do you measure conversion? It may be a little tricky to measure it. However, there is one method that can give you an idea about how well things are turning out for you. Track the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions with the number of unique visits. This formula will help you see how your conversion rate is climbing (or falling), in other words, how well the SEO is working.
Keyword Ranking
Keywords are important markers that determine the success of your SEO Campaign. You can understand how well the campaign is working by observing and analyzing target keyword rankings. Better rankings obviously mean that your campaign is working. However, it is important to note that fluctuations (at least in the initial months) is part of the deal. While you may ideally want the keyword rankings to keep climbing the charts, that’s not going to happen immediately. But if the keywords are not showing positive results even after six months, there may be some flaws in the strategy.
You can keep a track of how your keywords are doing by observing their positions at the beginning of the campaign and again at the end of the first month, second month and so on. The ultimate aim should be to see your keywords rank in the first page of the search engine results page. However do not distress if that doesn’t happen immediately. It takes time for SEO to show results. Patience and perseverance are key here.
You can also run a comparison check against your competitor and see how your keywords are performing. If your competitor’s keywords are performing better than yours, you may need to re-evaluate your strategy.
Traffic
Another parameter through which you can measure the success of your SEO Campaign is traffic. Increased traffic is directly related to SEO success. If you are inclined to measure the success of your campaign by an increase in rankings, then you are doing it all wrong. It is not necessary that improved rankings mean increase in traffic.
One of the easiest ways to measure traffic is to see the number of hits on the web pages. Google Analytics is one of the most trusted tools for this purpose. Using this tool, you can track traffic progress over a period of time. With this tool you can assess demographic profile of visitors to your site, geographical locations, time when traffic increases (or decreases) and so on. Apart from Google Analytics there are several other online tools you can use for this purpose.
It is important to measure traffic not only to estimate the success of your SEO Campaign strategy but also to judge success of your advertising and other marketing strategies. Measuring traffic will help you review your overall marketing strategy if required. By measuring traffic, you can also identify the conversion rate. How many people visit and buy, what is the bounce rate, how many read the content etc. will be highlighted.
Time Spent On Web Pages
Is it enough to witness increased traffic to your website? No, it isn’t, unless the time spent brings more to the table for you. This means that increase in traffic should ideally also increase conversion rate. Users should be spending more time on the web pages. If it’s the blog page, you should be able to measure how much time users are spending reading the posts. Similarly for product review pages, you would want them to stick around longer. If your campaign is ensuring that people are spending more time on your website, then the stagey is working for you. However, if that’s not the case then you will need to ramp up your efforts.
Conclusion
It is very important that you have an effective SEO Campaign strategy that helps improve your website’s visibility, traffic, conversion rate and more. Since SEO is a tech savvy trade that also demands expertise, it is imperative that you outsource the work to a digital marketing company that can do the job for you. While there are many such agencies out there today, you should hire the services of a company which has a proven track record.
At Cyrusson Inc. we have devised a complete digital solution that helps improve your website’s visibility through multiple approaches, namely –
- Online Ad Campaigns (PPC)
- Business Listings Management
- Reputation Management
- Social Media Marketing
- Website Development
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO Campaign)