How can you measure SEO success for your project?

Measuring results or SEO success is a critical component of any SEO campaign. As there are a plethora of variables in an SEO campaign, a successful campaign needs a perfect management system in order to ensure that the work is timely delivered. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) serve as this management system, enabling you to determine what is working.

 

KPIs are also a way to explain your success to your customers (or, in the case of insiders, to senior company management). Typical SEO KPIs, such as metrics and keyword rankings from tools like Majestic SEO & Moz, may work better for you, but the customers you serve need to see more than just improved rankings and high domain authority; they want to see sales, and they want to see an increase in leads.

 

In this article, we’ll look at how you can use KPIs to track the success of your SEO campaigns better and improve your results. And most importantly, how your SEO company in India can use KPIs to explain the value of your SEO campaigns to your customers.

 
SEO KPIs
 

Let’s face it, effectively measuring your SEO results, and digital marketing campaigns can be challenging. There is a lot of data out there, but tools like Google Analytics are often confusing rather than providing insight.

 

These tools need to be customized to meet the specific goals of your business. To do this, you need to look at the expected results and incorporate them into your SEO strategy with key performance indicators that your clients can understand.

 

At my company, Bowler Hat, the KPIs we use for our SEO programs are designed to do more than tracking the rankings for a narrow set of keywords. Instead, we look at the impact on organic traffic (visibility), the relevance of the traffic (engagement), the overall quality, and the likelihood that that traffic will lead to some sort of sale lead, or conversion.

 

We also look at the actual output of the campaign. That is content created to build buzz, links made to build authority, and related referral traffic. Finally, we also look at the traditional SEO metrics provided by tools like Moz and Majestic SEO.

 

This is not a template and needs to be customized to your specific tasks and goals, but it should give you 90% of the way to significantly improve your search engine KPIs and reporting.
 

Search Engine Optimization Metrics 

 
These are the traditional KPIs that you can use to evaluate your progress. Often it would help if you compared these to the value of your competitors to provide real context. In general, as a site gains credibility and authority, there is a correlation between its ranking for key search terms and the organic traffic it receives.

 

While these metrics are essential, they are not the language of business. Therefore, your priorities in reporting will depend on your client’s understanding of SEO (and, of course, you should always aim to improve it).

• Rank for secondary benchmark keywords (local/organic)
• Rank for main converting keywords (local/organic)
• Majestic Trust Flow
• Moz Page Authority
• Majestic Citation Flow
• Majestic Trust & Citation Balance
• Moz Domain Authority
• Moz Spam Score

 
Real-world SEO KPIs

Here we would like to see how the work we have done has affected the site. Do you see an increase in traffic? Are there more pages that are generating overall traffic, and is the reach of the topic increasing? Is there an increase in branded search traffic on top of increased exposure? These indicators are often important because that is the key to search engine optimization.

• Increase in organic traffic
• Increase in the number of pages on your site that generate traffic
• Increase in non-branded search traffic
• Percentage increase in organic conversions
• Percentage increase in traffic from specific geographic areas
• Number of organic impressions (Search Console)
• Organic click-through rate (CTR) (Search Console)

 
Referral Traffic 

A solid SEO campaign from any top SEO company will do more than just increase organic traffic to your business. If links are an essential part of your strategy, it is wise to show added value here, as this exposure can drive more quality referral traffic. This shows how an SEO strategy can have multiple marketing effects; credible referral traffic often has a higher conversion rate than organic search traffic.

 

• Referral traffic growth rate
• Percentage improvement in referral conversions
• Percentage improvement in engagement metrics (bounce, page, time)

 
Brand Impact
 

When you increase your visibility in search, you also increase your overall visibility, which is another way of advertising. Therefore, you should also look at the increase in brand search traffic and mentions of your brand and see how that correlates with what you are doing”.

• Percentage improvement in brand search traffic
• Percentage improvement in mentions of your brand

 
Key Performance Indicators for Link Building
 

Links are one of the top three metrics for improving search engine visibility and are often the main tangible component of a long-term SEO campaign (along with content). We need to report the total number of links, links from authority sites, and links from highly relevant sites. These links are usually taken from our link list and are tailored to the client’s industry.

• Total number of links built
• Number of links from authority sites
• Number of links from related sites

 
Lead Generation KPIs
 

Leads are an essential part of overall digital marketing services, but message classification and sales funnels are becoming increasingly complex. Social signups, newsletter signups, and other downloads and leads are impacting lead generation for businesses. Therefore, you need to measure the impact of your SEO efforts on lead generation.

 

• Percentage increase in the number of newsletter signups
• Rate of growth in social followers/leaders, etc.
• Business-specific lead generation goals (datasheets, white papers, etc.)

 

Discuss well with your client what the customer journey looks like and understand the many steps involved. You may need to work with your client to create incentives for leads, but this will only add value to your campaign.