How to Measure a Successful SEO Campaign?

Creating impeccable strategies for SEO campaigns and putting time and money into running them is not enough. You should also keep track of your SEO campaigns to know whether they are going in the right direction.

But why do you need to measure an SEO campaign if you have already implemented other effective strategies?

Let’s understand this with an example. 

Let’s say you are driving a car but don’t have a speedometer; how will you know whether you are driving at the right speed? If your speed is higher than recommended, cops will penalize you. An unsafe driving speed can also increase the risk of an accident. Contrary, if you are too slow, chances are you will not make it on time. All in all, having a speedometer is necessary!

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The same goes with an SEO campaign; if you don’t monitor it regularly or periodically, how will you know that your marketing efforts are going to pay back? Not to mention, if your campaign is really not on the right track, it can backfire, resulting in a loss.

That’s why experts always recommend keeping a tab on your SEO campaigns! Whether you manage your SEO projects in-house or hire a digital marketing agency, you should measure your SEO efforts performance. After all, SEO is the KEY to driving maximum visitors to the website.

Evaluating your campaign’s progress enables you to determine the practices that are not working or potentially focus more on your campaign goals and help you improve traffic, lead generation, and ROI. Also, this will help you in creating future campaigns.

In addition, if you succeed in an SEO campaign, you don't need to majorly rely on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing. Infact,  70% of marketers consider SEO more effective than PPC.

How can you measure SEO Success?

Correctly measuring the success of your SEO campaign greatly depends on your objectives and expectations. If you have never established a goal before starting a campaign, you can never evaluate its success. 

Thus, you should first set your goals and consider KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) while monitoring; KPIs are indicators of progress towards intended results. But keep in mind whatever KPIs you set should:

• Stand high on your goals

• Provide objective evidence of progress towards achieving a result

• Offer a clear comparison that gauges the degree of performance change over time

There are three KPIs you should consider when measuring an SEO campaign's success:

• Ranking

• Traffic 

• Conversion

When setting goals, you should first analyze your resources. Don’t set goals like increasing the organic traffic by 100% in a month. Such expectations can be unrealistic and impractical. Instead, you can plan to improve traffic gradually - let’s say by 15% or 20%. 

Establishing goals not only helps you in measuring SEO effectiveness but also allows you to effectively plan your budget. It prevents overspending or underspending, neither of which are good for your business!

Once you set your goals, it’s time to evaluate your success. To do this, you need to look at several things. Firstly, you need accurate and ample data about your site, which you can achieve by utilizing analytic software. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Angelfish Actual Metrics, AT Internet, AWStats, BBClone, etc., are some of the best website analytics software.

These tools can track, measure, and report website activity, including user clicks, visitor sources, and site traffic. Using these tools, you can determine what’s happening on your site, what’s working (and what’s not).

Analytic software provides a lot of information. But, how can you analyze the analytical data? Well, here is your answer.

How to Grab Critical Information from Analytical Data? 

Once you connect your site to Google Analytics or other analytics software, it’s time to analyze the data provided by the software. Here are some of the things you should look at while evaluating your SEO performance:

• Organic Search Traffic

In simple words, organic traffic refers to the traffic you get through unpaid sources, which is basically free traffic! Of course, it is one of the most important metrics. The more you get organic traffic, the less you need to spend on PPC, and the more chances you have to translate prospects into paying customers.

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You’ll be amazed that organic searches drive around53.3% of all website traffic. This means most of the traffic comes from organic means. To succeed in the digital space, you should invest time and money in SEO. Why? Because SEO can reduce the cost of customer acquisition by 87.41% on average compared to digital advertising. Also, if you get a CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of 39.6%, Google may even rank your website in the #1 position on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

So, track your organic traffic weekly or monthly and ensure that it is increasing. You may experience some drops due to seasonality and other variables. But if this is a recurring issue or your traffic gradually decreases, you should recheck your SEO practices. You can improve your keyword positions because it can help you get more user clicks. 

• Organic Revenue

If you run an eCommerce store, you should place a proper eCommerce tracking system to access your organic revenue data, meaning reviews you have earned strictly from organic traffic. 

Of course, you want to increase your revenue quarter by quarter, but don’t be discouraged by the occasional dip. If you don’t have a proper explanation for the dip, you should dig deeper into your data. You can take help from the experts at Digital Marketing Agency to improve your organic revenue. Our experts will use a mix of proven and effective strategies to help you overcome your barriers and leverage your strengths.

• Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave a site without taking action, such as not filling out the clinic form or leaving the cart abandoned. When a visitor bounces from your site, it means they didn’t convert. A high bounce rate can affect your search engine ranking because search engine lenses will take your site as an unreliable source for that keyword searched by the user. 

But how can you know whether this bounce rate is good or bad? As a rule of thumb, the bounce rate between 26% to 40% is considered excellent. 41% to 55% is roughly average, and more than that is an alarming stage for SEO project managers. 

If your website falls in the average or alarming stage, you should immediately look at the root cause of the bounce rate.

• Conversion Rate

The process of translating a visitor into a customer is called a conversion. You can evaluate the conversion rate by dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of interactions and then multiplying that number by 100  to evaluate the percentage. For instance, if you have 60 conversions from 1,000 conversions, your conversion rate would be:

60/1000 x 100 = 6%

Now, you may have a question “what’s a good conversion rate?” Well, it depends on your business type. However, on average, a conversion rate above 10% is considered good.

If your conversion rate is less than 2, you should check out funnels and other aspects to know what things are stopping your customer from making a purchase. If this happens because of any technical aspect, you immediately improve it. If this is because of a trust issue, you should add some trust badges on your website that your products or services are reliable and your payment gateways are also secured.

You can also use various conversion rate optimization software to improve your conversion rate, like Mouseflow, Tars, ConvertBox, etc. These tools will give you data to make an informed decision on what gets your user to convert.

• Time Spent On Page

Time spent on a page is another key metric you can check on Google Analytics. This will help you know the visitor's intent and how you can improve that. 

If your visitors spend a good amount of time on your site, it means your website provides them with the content they are looking for! This will also help search engine lenses to know that your site is reliable, thus improving your ranking.

According to Klipfolio, a good benchmark for average time on a page is 52 secondsacross multiple industries.

• Pages Per Visitor

This metric will let you know how interactive and engaging your site is. If your visitor visits more than one page of your site, it means your visitors love your content! This helps you rank higher on SERPs as search engines always strive to provide users with the best, most reliable, and most engaging information.

Takeaway!

SEO plays an important role in driving organic traffic. To create a successful SEO campaign, you must plan your strategy before your campaign is live. You also need to monitor your keyword rankings, backlinks, and other ranking factors.

Above, we have mentioned some of the metrics you need to focus on while monitoring your SEO campaign. In addition, you can check:

• Returning vs. new customers

• Crawl errors

• Traffic by device type

• Keywords volume

• Keyword relevance and search intent

• Domain quality and relevancy

• Page quality

• Anchor text

But keeping a tab on all these things requires deep knowledge of/ expertise in SEO. 

Advisory: leave this to experts. 

We have a team of SEO specialists who will help you create a comprehensive and growth-oriented digital marketing plan to take your business to new heights. You are just a call away from making your business a huge success!

Contact us now!