Measuring
SEO results
Learn SEO in five steps
Step four - measurement
All SEO platforms have keyword tracking tools which can help measure if keyword rankings are increasing or decreasing. It’s important to remember, however, a web page can rank for hundreds of keywords. So even if your main keywords may see slow changes, other keywords can be increasing their rankings and providing additional traffic to your site.
Rather than relying directly on keyword rankings, a better approach is to measure the overall increase in organic traffic which comes to your site.
Measuring this type of traffic is achieved through Google Analytics and various other platforms. When first setting up/improving an SEO campaign you should note down original metrics (visitors, time on page etc) as a benchmark for future performance.
You can set up an SEMRush and a Google Analytics dashboard with different tools and reports to show SEO performance on one page (rather than having to sort through multiple reports).
An analytics dashboard can be filtered to show insights based on organic traffic only. The dashboard can also show user experience signals such as time on page, pages viewed etc. Ideally, you want these user experience signals to be improving over time.
You can create your own dashboard or use an existing template created by community members. When creating a new dashboard, select ‘import from gallery’ and simply search to find a pre-created SEO dashboard which is most suitable for your brand.
The main goal of your business website is most likely to convert visitors into paying customers. You can create an Analytics segment which displays organic traffic only and use the goals/conversion report to see how many conversions this audience has achieved.
This will reveal how successful SEO content has been in converting free organic traffic into converting users.
Siege Media have put together a useful SEO/content marketing ROI spreadsheet which helps estimate the revenue and costs resulting from your online marketing efforts. The spreadsheet takes data from SEMRush (i.e. organic traffic value) and internal resources to determine how profitable your content marketing is expected to be.
Resource
There are also many Google Data Studio templates to display SEO performance and dashboards.
Tip
If you find your content pieces are attracting large amounts of organic traffic but few conversions, try implementing CRO strategies to boost conversions.
Using SEMRush, you can view the total number of referring domains as a key SEO metric which should be increasing over time. This shows the number of websites which link to your website and is different to the total number of backlinks.
One website can provide multiple backlinks to your website (with each subsequent link becoming weaker in terms of link juice) so referring domains is a better metric to track.
Google Search Console
Search Console provides the opportunity to see exactly which search queries/keywords people are searching for in Google to reach your website.
You can keep track of how many times your content articles appear in Google search results (i.e. impressions) and how many times they are clicked on (i.e. bringing traffic to the website).
Core web vitals (provided within Search Console) reveal an indication as to the quality of the user experience on your website. If these metrics are performing poorly, your SEO may underperform due to users leaving the website as a result of a poor user experience (such as slow page speed).
This concludes step four of learning SEO (measurement). In step five (improving SEO performance), we’ll cover how to leverage other channels to improve the overall performance of your SEO strategy.
Learn digital marketing in five steps
