How to Measure SEO?

Measuring SEO Success

Although every business is unique, and every website has different metrics that matter, the following information is almost universal.

We get a lot of people asking how we can measure SEO, however, SEO is different to other digital channel, and projections are sometimes harder to give. It is however, crucial to measure performance in order to succeed.

We get asked the following questions frequently:

1. How long do I need to invest in SEO for?
2. How long until I will be number one for the keywords I want to be?
3. How much will my visibility increase within the first three months
4. How much increase in traffic will I receive?

All of these questions are almost impossible to answer apart from the first one. You should never stop investing in SEO, even if you’re on the first page for the phrases you initially set out to rank for. The reason for this is because, as soon as you stop creating new content and optimising your pages, your rankings will soon slip!

This is where SEO is harder to give projections. With PPC, we can say, if you invest £X you will receive X clicks to your website, and with a bid of £X you will be in position X. SEO is more technical and is monitored through algorithms. Therefore, if we optimise your website to best practice, surface fresh and rich content, generate backlinks etc then this is all positive signals for Google to push your website up the rankings.

With the initial piece of keyword research that Peaky Digital generates, this will identify the terms that are least competitive. This is calculated through the volume of searches compared to the number of websites that are targeting that keyword through their page title. This then will allows us to give keywords which we want us to target which should be ‘quicker wins’, as well as seasonality of keywords.

Monitoring SEO Success

In terms of monitoring the SEO performance, progress can be monitored on a variety of ‘SEO metrics’:

1. Trust flow – ensuring we are disavowing all spammy links through your Google Search Console means your website is more trusted by Google

2. Citation flow – the number of links to your website correlates to the ranking of your website. Therefore, the more links you have, the higher your citation flow is, and the more likely Google are to increase your rankings – however, these links must be of a high quality and relevant.

3. Search traffic – The volume of traffic coming to the website, as well as looking at impressions your website has had through Search Console

4. Tracked keywords – monitoring the progress of tracked keywords to monitor monthly progress

5. Referral Traffic – Keep track of the impact of each traffic source from your website, from links across the web or in trackable campaigns.

6. Conversion Rate of Search Queries – This is possibly one of the most important metrics. We need to ensure you’re ranking for high quality terms which are going to drive you enquiries and revenue.

It’s challenging to optimise for specific behaviours of search engines, because their algorithms aren’t public. But a combination of tactics has proven effective, and new data is always emerging to help track the variables that influence ranking, and fluctuations in ranking signals. You can even use the search engines themselves to gain a competitive advantage by structuring clever queries and by utilising data the engines have published. This all helps to formulate your SEO strategy.

To read our blog on how to implement SEO for your business to find out more about SEO and what is involved.