3 Quick Ways to Measure the Success of Your SEO Campaign When it comes to measuring the success of your SEO campaign there is more to look at than just where you rank on the search engines. SEO is a complex process, and measuring it is just as complicated. Rankings Keyword rankings are the most common way to track your SEO success. Tracking your keywords allows you to better expand your SEO strategy to keywords that require more attention. When tracking your rankings, the important thing that you are looking for is growth. Overall you want to see a rise in rankings, and landing on the first page is ideal. It is important to keep in mind that not every month you will have gains in all of your keyword terms. The search engine algorithm is always changing, so it is completely normal to have small gains and losses from month to month. While monitoring your keyword rankings is important to tracking SEO, it is only one small piece of the puzzle when looking at your overall campaign. You want to make sure you are getting good conversions and more quality visits. Organic Visits The first metric to look at is traffic to your website. It is important to take a look at not only your overall traffic, but specifically organic traffic. When looking at your organic traffic the key metric that you are looking at is growth. If you have a successful SEO campaign your traffic should increase bit by bit. In order to best measure this, it’s important to compare apples to apples. You can compare month over month, but keep in mind outside factors could affect traffic. Typically, in summer months’ people are not as interested in elective surgery so if you are comparing June to May there may be drop in traffic. For that reason, besides comparing month over month it’s important to compare year over year, if that data is available. To view your organic visit your Google Analytics account and go to Acquisition>All Traffic>Channels. From here you will see a breakdown of all traffic to your website. You can select Organic Search to break down organic visits even more. Traffic Quality The next piece we want to measure is quality of your organic traffic. If you have a high number of visitors to your website, but they are not interacting, you probably need to adjust your SEO strategy. There are three key metrics that we want to look at: Pages Per Visit Average Session Duration Bounce Rate In Google Analytics, on the Channels report you will be able to see your standings for each of these. At Fast Track Marketing we find the following to be good goals for each of the three metrics: Page Per Visit: 2.5 Average Session Duration: 2:00 Bounce Rate: 50-60% As you take a closer look at each of the metrics you can judge how well your SEO campaign is working and what areas need improvement. SEO is always evolving and is never done. Keeping track of the many different facets of your results is important to best understand how effectively your strategy is working. If you need help with your SEO campaign and tracking your results, contact Fast Track Marketing today!