If you’re investing in something on a monthly basis for your business, chances are you want to know that it’s working and providing the benefit to your organization that you’ve expected.
Understandably, one question we get asked a lot by clients and potential customers is ‘how do I know if an SEO program is working?’
Whether they are currently working with us or they are trying to gauge the value of the SEO program they’ve implemented through another agency to determine whether they should make a change, many business owners are curious to know if the program they are investing in should be considered a success or if there is room for improvement.
Here, we’ll review a few key factors to consider when it comes to understanding whether or not your SEO program is providing the benefits it should be.
Signs That Indicate a Successful SEO Program
A decade ago, it was a lot easier to know whether or not SEO was working for your business. All you needed to do was look at the search engine results. If you were ranking in the top spot – or close to the top spot – things were going well.
Now, SEO has become a bit more complex and nuanced. There are a wide variety of things to review and consider when it comes to evaluating the success of an SEO program.
1. You’re Making Progress Towards Your Goals
Before getting too caught up in the metrics and statistics related to website performance, take a moment to review the business goals you set for the SEO program. Were you hoping to sell more of a certain product? Generate more leads through the website? Increase brand awareness? Improve the site from a design perspective? Have you started making progress towards the goals you set?
SEO takes awhile to make a tangible impact. In most cases, it can take at least 6 months – sometimes longer – to start seeing results. If you’re at or before the 6 month mark and you’re starting to see progress towards your goals that’s a good indication that your SEO program is on the right track.
2. Your Website is Improving
Search engine optimization is all about improving your website’s performance, both in terms of user experience (for the humans visiting the site) and for the search engine bots crawling the site and determining how it should perform in the search engine results.
There are many tactics involved in on-site search engine optimization, including:
- content creation
- updating headings and subheadings
- infusing keywords
- interlinking
- editing and resizing images
- adjusting metadata
And that’s just naming a few. If you’re seeing changes being made on your site in these areas – or others – that help to improve the user experience and enhance the site as a whole, then you should feel confident that your SEO program is moving in the right direction.
3. Key Metrics Indicate That Things Are Going Well
Reviewing website statistics is another great way to analyze how things are going in terms of your SEO program. If you’re using a program like Google Analytics, looking at statistics can feel really overwhelming since there are just so many available.
Additionally, because SEO is so complex, no one metric can tell you how things are truly going. It’s important to look at metrics from a holistic perspective, taking various stats into consideration as you’re determining how successful your SEO program is so far.
With that in mind, here are a few metrics that our strategists tend to pay attention to as they’re working on clients’ SEO programs:
Keyword Rankings
Where you rank for keywords you care about and phrases people are searching when they’re looking for what your business has to offer, and how those rankings are changing over time is one factor that can indicate how things are going with your SEO program. Keyword placements can be volatile, so this shouldn’t be the only thing you look at.
Goal Completions
If you’re hoping to generate leads through your website, monitoring goal completions is a good way to gauge progress. After all, the end goal of SEO is ultimately to generate more business for your organization. Form submissions from potential customers, consultation requests, product orders if you have an e-commerce site – increases in these areas often indicate that SEO is having a positive impact on your web presence.
Organic Traffic
Most websites receive visits from a variety of types of traffic, including organic traffic, direct traffic, social media traffic, paid search traffic, and referral traffic. If you’ve implemented an SEO program, you’ll want to pay attention to changes in organic traffic. If organic traffic was decreasing and you see a reversal in the downward trend, or if organic traffic has started to grow over the course of the SEO program that’s usually a good sign. Again, organic traffic isn’t the only indicator of success and it can take time for on-site SEO efforts to have a noticeable impact on traffic. You’ll want to view this metric with a grain of salt and in relation to other metrics, but it is a good thing to keep in mind.
There are dozens more metrics to pay attention to when gauging the success of an SEO program, and the ones you should truly care about will vary based on your individual program and the goals you have set.
The most important thing to remember is not to get too caught up in one or two specific metrics as you’re analyzing progress. Site statistics aren’t the only thing that can indicate you’re making progress with your website in terms of SEO.
4. Your Strategist is Happy
If you’re wondering if the efforts you’re making from an SEO perspective are working, one of the best ways to find out is by having a conversation with your strategist. He or she will be familiar with the ins and outs of your SEO strategy and should be able to tell you why each of the projects and elements they are working on is beneficial from an SEO standpoint.
If you’re working with a reputable SEO company (like us!), your strategist will have a finger on the pulse of your SEO program and will have an accurate sense of what’s working and what’s not. He or she will also be invested in the success of the program, so if your strategist is happy with the progress being made you should be too! Trusting your strategist and working together as partners can help to make your SEO program as effective as possible.
Implement an Effective SEO Program For Your Business Today!
At Mannix Marketing, we understand that search engine optimization is a somewhat abstract concept and work hard to make SEO accessible to the businesses we work with. We’re proud to partner with clients in dozens of industries to implement customized SEO programs, helping them to work towards their business goals and improve their online presence.
We’ve implemented successful SEO programs for hundreds of clients over the past two decades, and we’d love to help you!
Wondering if your current SEO program with another agency is working? Think Mannix Marketing might be a good fit for your business? Give us a call today at 518-743-9424 or contact us online to schedule a free consultation with one of our strategists!
Curious about the impact our SEO programs have had for past clients? Check out our SEO program case studies for an inside look at some of our successful digital marketing campaigns.
Looking for more information about the SEO services we offer? Review our available search engine optimization packages here.