Top 5 Ways to Find SEO is WORKING or Not! |
Posted: June 12, 2012 |
Top 5 Ways to Find SEO is WORKING or Not! June 11th, 2012
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that can give your website great success, but it is up to you to know which methods are working and which are not. Knowing what is working, and what needs improvement will help you make changes so that you can get higher in the search engine rankings. Measuring the success of your SEO campaign is not always black and white. There are so many factors affecting the impact of our SEO work that it is not always possible to pinpoint exactly what is and is not working. You could drive yourself crazy by checking you site’s analytics every hour and panic over small changes, but you really need to look at the big picture when it comes to determining if your SEO campaign is working. Below I will illustrate 5 ways to find out if your SEO campaign has been successful or not: 1. Traffic:When determining if your SEO campaign is successful traffic is usually the first, and most obvious, place that people look. As an SEO company, the most common complaint I get is, “My traffic is the same; SEO must not be working!!” Most of the time, this statement is based on cynicism instead of reality. Traffic is a great measure of success but only if you compare it to baseline traffic measurements. These measurements should be taken at the beginning of each campaign to compare results. If you don’t establish baselines for future comparisons, then you’re really setting yourself up for failure when trying to decide if your SEO is truly working or not. In the future, be sure to compare your traffic to your baselines to see if there was a net gain or loss. 2. More leads:If you are a business that really focuses on producing website leads and you have noticed a few more really making it through the website lately chances are your search engine optimization is starting to work. If you have been taking a proactive online branding approach to marketing your business then things could be starting to work very well. Fire-back at those web leads as soon as you can. Let them know care about their business. 3. Increase in non-branded keywords:If you were to take a look at your latest analytics report, you should be able to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website. A good portion of those might be branded keywords (company name, product names, etc), but a sure sign of SEO success is when you notice an increase in non-branded keywords that lead to visitors. Many of these non-branded keywords will be ones that you are actively targeting on your site, but you should also start to see variations of those keywords driving visitors each month. Even if those long tail keywords are only driving a few visitors each month, it means that your website is showing up in the search results for more and more searches. 4. Increase in “other” areas:There are several other metrics in SEO that sort of fall into the “other” areas that may help you determine success. These include:
5. Installing strong analytical tools:Installing a strong analytics tool on your website will allow you to not only view figures such as page views and traffic levels, but also the sources of your website traffic and the keyphrases that they searched for to reach your website. Is traffic arriving to your site through the keywords that you identified as being crucial to your SEO? If not, it may be time to re-evaluate these terms. To do this, we would recommend that you use a tool that allows you to see the amount of approximate search volume for specific search terms across the Web. The Google Keyword Generator is a great tool for this and will allow you to research which terms are receiving searches and which are not. An hour spent using this tool could identify tens of keywords or phrases that you had not thought to optimize for before. SEO is very important for any site, and it is up to you to make sure that the optimization methods that you employ are successful. You have to keep an eye on it at all times. While it might get a bid tedious, it is very important for you to be aware of what is going so that you can change anything.
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