When an SEO marketing campaign is launched, surely the top management would like to know if it is doing the company any good or not. It is up to the SEO expert to find out the answer, and then inform the top management about how well the campaign is doing. In order to measure the performance of SEO choosing a company, there are different elements that SEO experts can take into account.
Keyword Ranking
This is an SEO metric which tells the expert about how well a keyword is performing. Google Keyword Planner lets experts see how well a target keyword is doing, and whether the website is growing or not. If the target keywords are not receiving much attention, then the expert would change them or look for better ones. If an assessment of how keywords are doing isnt conducted, then an SEO campaign is likely to fail.
Quality And Quantity Of Backlinks
Backlinks are used by search engines to rank websites. If SEO experts want to improve the ranking of a website, then they should include backlinks in their website. The backlinks should be of high quality, and must not be broken. With the help of monitor backlinks website, an SEO expert would be able to analyze backlinks. They would be able to know the number of backlinks which have been added, the duration during which they were added, and the quality of the link.
When analyzing backlinks, an SEO expert would know whether the websites which are linking back to them or endorsing them, are trusted by Google or not. In order to judge the quality of a website that endorses another, the quality and quantity of those links should be assessed. Through MozRank, an SEO tool, the quality and authority of a websites domain can also be tested.
Organic Search Traffic
A key performance indicator of SEO is organic search traffic. When a company wants to promote itself, they often buy ads on Google, so that they appear on the top of search engine results. However, this doesnt give them organic search traffic. When a website appears on SERPs of Google, on the top and that too without buying any ads, then that is called organic search traffic.
To find out about organic traffic, Google Analytics can be used. In Google Analytics, the Acquisition menu should be opened, and from there, the expert can select All Traffic and then, channels. This would tell the expert about the landing pages that attract the most traffic, the keywords that are delivering the most traffic, the search engines which direct more traffic to a website as compared to others, and the web pages that attract visitors the most.
Shares On Social Media
A social share are important in SEO, and if users are sharing the links of a website on social media websites, then that means more traffic for the site. Every SEO expert would like to track the social shares of a brands web page, because social media sharing is an SEO strategy. Social media profiles should be maintained by an SEO expert, because they are indexed by search engines. In order to get a good ranking for social posts, a post should be shared for a significant number of times.
With the help of Google Analytics and by accessing Acquisition menu, the sources of website traffic can be easily viewed, for example, channels like email, social media, search, referral or direct. Another thing that the SEO expert should assess, are the posts which users share on social media the most; i.e., the topic of the posts and then analyze, why the users would share those posts.
Search Engine Visibility
Even though this metric doesnt measure the performance of SEO, it is still helpful to know how many people can see the link of a website in SERPs. If a website is visible to most of the users, then it is indexed properly. This is the best way for SEO experts to check whether all the important web pages of a website are indexed and appear in SERPs are not. If they dont, then this could mean that the robots.txt file is blocking it and if it is an important web page, then it should be immediately fixed.
Measuring the performance of SEO is an important aspect of its success. If broken things or things which are not working are not fixed, then this could be problematic for a company.