If you want to know how to know if SEO is working, let me tell you that there are two metrics that I ask to be judged on: rankings and traffic from the search engines.
You might think it would be obvious we know when SEO is working, and sometimes it is, but other times it is more complex. Sometimes people have metrics set up in their minds that are not an accurate representation of what is really happening. Sometimes there is distorting information that is mixed in with the information we’re looking for.
Ranking 1st
The 1st area we see improvement is in your rankings. I usually see improvements in rankings before we start seeing improvements in traffic from the search engines.
Every month I put the rankings for each client into a spreadsheet to check. Over time rankings should go up for search phrases that we think there is traffic for. Say you went form ninety-ninth on the tenth page to the second page. It is not really going to provide you with traffic and money, but it is progress in the right direction.
Traffic 2nd
The next thing we want to measure is traffic from the search engine. Ultimately, increasing traffic from the search engines that is your target market is the whole purpose of SEO.
You can compare traffic from the search engines, for example, over a ninety day period to see if it is increasing. The rankings do not even have to work out: if the traffic is there and it is growing then SEO is working.
Please keep in mind that not every month is up. Also, with some businesses the traffic improvement form SEO is hard to measure. For example, if your website or brand gets a lot of branded searches (say your business name) typically due to to other forms of marketing, then taht data will get lumped with non-branded search engine traffic. It obviously shouldn’t be credited to SEO, but since Google doesn’t pass keyword data to the traffic tracking software most of the time, we can’t pull this data apart. This is not common, but I do have clients that start with a lot of “search engine traffic” that has 100% come about due to offline marketing.
Progression of Metrics:
Usually rankings appear first. Let us assume you have no rankings, and you are starting from nothing. You get onto page three for some term and you go, “Wow this is great” and you are starting to move forward from that. At that point, you are likely not getting any traffic, but you are getting closer to it. It is pretty rare to go from nothing to the first page very quickly. There are ways you can do it, but it is not something you can reasonably expect to build something lasting on.
There are potential information disruptions to the rankings that make it difficult to analyze SEO progress. There are a couple of different ways where it looks like there is not traffic when there actually is, and sometimes it looks like there is traffic when there actually is not.
One area that is hard to track with rankings is low volume search phrases. You cannot really track every search phrase. You need to try to track as many as is reasonable. There is an infinite amount of possible search phrases out there so you cannot track them all. We are able to catch these rankings via traffic that is arriving on specific pages that are targeting these low volume search phrases.
Some websites get a lot of low volume traffic because the low volume searches is a very large percentage of the traffic out there. I do have a client site where there are really big terms and the rankings are improving but they are not high enough to where I would think they would drive a lot of traffic. Additionally, there is a large amount of long-tail search volume that we cannot really tell exactly how it is coming about because Google does not pass that data anymore. They used to pass. If you get a visitor from this exact search phrase they would pass that search phrase. Even without that, we can have an idea if that is happening because we see an increase in traffic from the search engines to specific pages. The rankings are not great, but if we get increasing traffic from the search engines, then the SEO is working.
You want both long-tail and high volume search phrases. That is part of the plan, but if it is a high volume search phrase and you are going up, then the long-tails are going up as well, and sometimes because they are less competitive you can go up quickly.
Traffic does not always give you the whole story. Traffic is not as simple as, “Okay, this is how much we got this month and this is how much we got the previous month.”No, first of all there are other forms of marketing off-line, social media and paid traffic that can affect these numbers. You could get search traffic and it is really direct mail that drove that traffic. Say you send out a direct mail piece with your brand name on it and the website is not obvious, so a lot of people go to the search engine and they type in your brand name. Then they go and click on your site. Google’s going to say that is search engine traffic, but really I would not count that as SEO traffic.
You would have to put all the pieces together and look at how they fit together to make a whole system analysis of it. It is not one thing that shows you everything. A common example that is very frustrating when someone picks one search phrase and that is all they look at. I have had that with a couple clients who have insisted on focusing on 1 single search phrase despite me consulting them to the contrary. I have tried to explain this to them over and over again. I am not sure why they hired me if they did not listen to my advice. Even though that 1 single search phrase got over 5,000 searches per month, it is less than 10% of the total search volume available to them.
How much data is needed to know if SEO is working?
If you have a cyclical business, some people have a month where this one specific search phrase can be ten times greater than just a couple of months later. You know if your business is cyclical. It then becomes more difficult to analyze traffic, as you really need years of data, not months. You cannot say, “Well, this month was up, was it because of SEO? I got more SEO traffic.” Relative to how much expected search volume? If our search engine traffic increased by twenty percent and the total amount of searches increase by forty percent, then actually that is not an improvement. It is something you want to know. The situation can go the other way. You can have an increase in rankings and improvements and the traffic can go down because this reporting period has a cyclical dip in searches.
I highly recommend you install some sort of tracking software right now – Google Analytics is popular and free. There are so many different one you can get. Google Analytics is simple and easy. I am totally fine with that. It is usually not hard to get the most important pieces of information out of these things and there are tons of free options. Whatever you do, just install something now if you do not have anything. You want to be able to track your data. You want to be able to know where you are now so you can know where you are in the future, if it is improvement or not.
You can easily filter: just go to the website, choose the time frame and then boom, it pops up. It is very easy to look at traffic from search engines. Again, it is not perfect, but it is pretty close. It gives a good estimate, and you can check monthly or ninety days and go from there. I can navigate the different URLs that the traffic is arriving at and, based upon that, we can make conclusions on where the traffic has really come from and what is really providing the value.
You can also combine traffic analysis with the sales generated. If it is generating additional sales that were not there before and you are not doing other kinds of marketing, or it is just a sudden spike and the rankings and traffic are increased, then you know we have a pretty good sign that SEO is working.
Sometimes SEO takes longer than you expect or hope to really kick in. There have been SEO projects with unique circumstances that need to be solved and things can be delayed. That does not mean the plan is not accurate or not going to provide you with a lot of value once you get through some of the unexpected bumps.
Let’s say you hire a contractor to inspect something that stinks underneath your floor and it turns out you need to ear out a bunch more floor as it is mold all across your house. The initial estimate of time and money is significantly exceeded, but not due to the contractor making any mistakes. Sometimes that is what happens with SEO when you hire a SEO consultant. It really depends on a lot of things. Sometimes we can see these bumps in the road ahead of time and sometimes they are hidden beneath the surface and you won’t know until you start SEO work and get some feedback from Google.
I would say most of the time within three months we can see some sort of significant and obvious improvement, but a lot of times it takes six months of diligent, focused study to put the pieces together right before you see, “Okay, now we have built a business asset that is extremely valuable and is going to continue to provide value to my business on an ongoing basis.”.
Do yourself and your SEO consultant a favor and have an open mind when it comes to deciding if SEO is working. If you walk into a project with a narrow view of measuring SEO success, then you’re setting your project up for failure.
