If you’re not in the digital marketing industry, campaign results and data can look a little confusing. It’s all well and good making an investment in an SEO strategy, but how do you know if it’s working?
Reading and understanding data reports can go a long way in helping you see the value in digital marketing. However, you need to know about more than just numbers to get a full understanding.
SEO campaign data will look different for every website. As well as that, the benchmark for ‘good’ data will also differ. To help you get a better understanding of what successful SEO campaign data looks like, we’ve created this in-depth guide.
What Is SEO?
It would be easy for us to dive straight in and get to the number crunching. However, before we do that we want to make clear what SEO is. We understand that those who do not work in marketing may get a bit confused about what their strategy is. This is particularly true if you have a few different campaigns running at once.
So, for the sake of clarity, this guide is about SEO data alone. This means that we are looking at the following things:
- Organic traffic
- SERPs (search engine results pages)
- Conversions
These cannot be looked at alone. When analysing the success of any SEO product, you need to review the data over time and make judgements based on the bigger picture.
Why Does SEO Need Time?
We’ve covered how long SEO takes to work before. If you haven’t seen that blog, we’d recommend giving it a read if you want an even better understanding of why the data needs to be reviewed over a longer period of time.
If you choose to judge the success of an SEO campaign using data from a short time frame, you’re not giving it a fair chance. This is particularly true if you’re only analysing data from the first 6 – 12 months since the work started. Results take time. As well as that, success can look very different depending on your industry and competition. In some cases, SERPs will be the best indicator of success, whereas others, an increase in organic traffic will be. Let’s discover why that might be.
When SERPs Indicate SEO Success
Where your website appears in the search engine results page (or SERPs) is a key metric when determining your SEO results.
An easy way to check where your website ranks is to open an incognito browser and search for your main keywords and your location. Monitor where your website appears and make note of it throughout the campaign. Remember that during the first 6 – 12 months, progress may stall or even appear to go backwards. As long as your website is correctly optimised, you need to exercise patience before deciding to make any changes.
Industries with less competition may judge their SEO success predominantly by their SERPs. This is particularly true for companies where their products and services aren’t in huge demand. Therefore, judging traffic may not be a true indicator of how well their campaign is working.
There certainly are many cases where websites can’t expect to perform well in terms of traffic. For example, if your industry is Organ Building and you’re optimising for Pipe Organ Repairs, you’re pretty unlikely to see huge amounts of traffic, no matter what area you’re in. However, if your website is appearing on page one, in a high spot for Pipe Organ Repairs in your area, you can still confirm that your SEO efforts are working.
At the end of the day, a page one position is about as good as it gets from an SEO package. Once you’ve reached the coveted top spot, you can’t really improve any more than that. At that stage, you should be putting your efforts into a maintenance strategy and considering adding PPC or social media advertising to your campaign if you want more traffic.
When An Increase In Organic Traffic Shows Success
Websites optimising for more competitive industries in highly populated areas may be inclined to assess traffic over SERPs. This is because it’s much more difficult to reach the front page of the search results. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t be seeing an increase in website traffic.
A good SEO strategy will focus on getting you found for your main keywords, as well as long-tail keywords. So, even if you’re nowhere near the top spot for your main services, you might be appearing to more users for niche searches and queries. Because these are much harder to track, it’s better to assess the results of the SEO strategy by monitoring the increase in website traffic over time.
Of course, we wouldn’t make any final judgements on the data until reaching months 6 – 12. If by 12 months there hasn’t been an increase in users on your site, it may be time to reassess your SEO strategy.
Conversions
The ultimate goal of most SEO strategies is to increase conversions. Improvements to where you rank in search results and increases in organic traffic tend to lead to more conversions, eventually.
Conversions will look different for each campaign. For many local businesses, these are measured by tracking phone calls and contact form submissions. For ecommerce websites, conversions are usually successful purchases.
What Does Good Look Like?
Good results will look different for each website. Therefore, we have to be quite vague in this guide. You can see improvements in different ways, and all improvements are valuable.
The best time to analyse the success of a campaign is at the 12 month mark. There will have been plenty of time for the SEO work to mature and the website will have built a year’s worth of authority and trust with Google.
A good result could be one of, a combination of, or all of the following:
- More page views throughout the website
- Appearing higher in search results for main keywords & longtails
- An increase in conversions (phone calls, contact form submissions etc.)
Want To Get Results From SEO?
If you want to reap the benefits that SEO has to offer, look no further than Search4Local. Our in-house SEO team are hugely talented and passionate about what they do. To see an increase in website traffic, improvements to your rankings and increases in conversions, get in touch with us today.
Written by Alice Farley
