Items to Measure after One Year of SEO
The goal of an SEO campaign is to improve a search engine presence as well as the number of relevant visitors to the website over the long-term. Due to the complexities of the search engine algorithms and the number of websites that are competing for target audience member attention, it’s nearly impossible to see results within the first few months of a campaign. However, after a year of ongoing content optimization and publication, link building, and social media there should be some traction if the campaign has been implemented properly.
Take a look at these items to gauge the success of your first year of SEO:
Inbound links
The purpose of building inbound links during an SEO campaign is twofold. First, inbound links from authoritative sites help to pass search engine trust over to your site. If a high quality and relevant site is linking over to your site, the thought is that your site is a high quality site by association. The second purpose of building links is to generate traffic from target audience members. To determine what the link building success of the program is, the first step is to compare the number of inbound links to the site before the program started to the number of inbound links after a year’s worth of link building. There should be a noticeable percentage increase. You can also compare the Moz rank which is based on trust and aims to mimic how Google views your site. That should also increase. In addition, you will want to look at all of the traffic sources over the last year to see how much traffic was delivered from the sites that you built links from.
New website content traffic
One of the most important components of a successful SEO campaign today is content. The websites that produce fresh, informative content on a regular basis (most likely on a blog) are the ones that will see the most significant jump in visitors to the site. Throughout the duration of an SEO campaign it’s recommended to post new thought leadership content on the blog at least once a week. Incorporating relevant keywords should optimize this content. After a year, you can look at how much traffic these SEO blog posts delivered to the site.
Social media visits
Like content marketing, social media marketing is also a necessary element of an SEO campaign today. People are using social media to find information on products and services. If your social content is shared across social networks naturally by target audience members it helps to improve your social signals, which is another way that the search engines measure the trust of a site and its content. As you build up your social media presence and share content that attracts additional followers, you should see the number of visitors from social media referral increase during an SEO campaign.
Conversions
While an improvement in traffic is important, it should correlate with an increase in conversions compared to before the SEO campaign was implemented. This means that the SEO campaign is not only delivering traffic, but is delivering the right kind of traffic from the right audience that will convert once they land on the site.
Categorized in: SEO
LIKE AND SHARE THIS ARTICLE:
