Top Must-Know Strategies to Measure SEO Success

When entering the SEO industry, you may feel uncertain about your achievements. You will spend months working on optimizing your site for search engines, but you can hardly see any benefits of it.  Eventually, you will realize that analyzing your results is essential and choose the most obvious metric to track- your rankings. As your rankings go up, they show that you’re doing SEO properly, right?

Unfortunately, I’ll have to disappoint you. One metric cannot show the results of your work. What about your customers’ conversions, bounce rates, backlink history? So, the only way to nudge your business in the right direction is to track multiple metrics or, so-called, KPIs.

Here are 5 most significant KPIs you should track to measure the performance of your SEO campaigns.  

Create your Own Dashboard

To harness all the power of your data, you need to spend countless hours collecting, analyzing, and managing mountains of metrics, graphs, and statistics. Once you collect all your data, you need to organize them properly in a visually appealing weekly/monthly/annual report you’ll deliver to your boss or client. Not to mention that, to do so, you need to invest in a plethora of SEO tools, which may cost you a penny.

Fortunately, there is a way to make all this much simpler. Namely, you could go with a reporting tool which integrates with all important SEO platforms and, in this way, have all your data in one place. Always go with those platforms that allow you to share the access to your dashboard to the rest of your team and create beautiful, personalized reports. Most importantly, you should keep in mind that every reliable reporting tool allows you to create your own KPI dashboard and measure only those KPIs that are currently important to you.

Analyze your Organic Rankings

Why do you optimize your site for search engines? To rank well, of course. That’s understandable, given the fact that those sites listed on the first page in the SERP receive more than 92% of all traffic. By tracking your organic rankings, you will be able to see if you’re targeting the right keywords, transferring the link juice properly, and making progress over time.

However, even though keeping track of keyword rankings is the foundation of your SEO strategy, it should not be the only metric you should focus on. Here is why:

• Search results are highly personalized. They change in accordance with our previous searches, search index, social activity, user behavior, and IP. This is why the results you and I would get by entering the same keywords in the search box would not be the same.

• Mobile and desktop rankings are different, at least for now. That’s why you need to analyze them parallelly.

• You can never be certain about how much traffic a specific keyword drives. Moz’s Rand Fishkin addressed this problem recently and stated that, instead of monitoring keywords, you should keep track of the pages receiving visits from search queries and measure the phrases they rank for. This approach will help you analyze not only your major keywords, but also the value of your pages and content.

Track Video Transcribing and Captioning Effects

This is something you might have overlooked, but transcribing and especially captioning your videos can  bring great SEO value to your already quality content.

• They increase your search traffic - studies have shown that pages with transcripts earn on average 16% more revenue than they did prior to the addition of transcripts.

• Improved user engagement due to the versatility of content consumption.

• By choosing a video captioning service you will be able to optimize your website for further keyword searches. By increasing the your visibility we are again coming back to the fact that a larger visibility generates more traffic.
  

Keep Track of your Backlinks

Your keyword rankings depend on a wide range of other on-page SEO factors and user interaction patterns, most important of which are your backlinks. Like you already know, any SEO strategy revolves around acquiring quality links from highly authoritative sites. To monitor your backlinks, you can use some of the most popular backlink trackers, such as Ahrefs or Majestic SEO that even have a free plan for newbies.

Tracking backlinks is immensely important not only because it shows you how authoritative your site is but also because it helps you evaluate the cost of links from various link-building strategies, see the success of your tactics, and even find potential link building opportunities in the future.

Determine your Traffic Quality

Many believe that quality is subjective and difficult to measure. In the world of SEO, that’s not true. Everything you do can be measured precisely. The same goes for the quality of the traffic your site receives.

What you actually track here is how much search engine traffic you get on a monthly basis and make sure this number is increasing. Remember, you should look at it over a period of at least a few months so that you can make a comparison and see how seasonal changes affect your traffic. Here are a few strategies you should keep in mind when assessing the quality of your website traffic:

• Determine your traffic sources to learn how your users find you. Namely, there are various traffic sources you need to track, such as organic traffic, direct traffic, paid search campaigns, referrals, social networks, etc.

• Detect some radical changes in your traffic. Are any unusual drops in your website traffic? If there are, you need to know what has caused them so you can prevent them in the future. But, bear in mind that not every drop you come across means that your SEO efforts are useless. Your traffic depends on a wide range of factors, such as seasonal fluctuations.

Overview

By keeping track of and measuring relevant KPIs, you will gain an invaluable insight into the performance and effectiveness of your SEO strategy. It will not only help you assess your website’s authority, but also tell you which practices and tools to stick to and which ones to ditch.  Only this way can you survive in today’s competitive digital marketing landscape.