4 Important SEO Reports to Measure Success
While it’s true that SEO is a long-term process and you aren’t going to see an immediate ROI, that doesn’t mean that there is no way track the success of the campaign. Throughout the duration of the campaign, it’s important to check on your Analytics to make sure that things are trending the way that they should be. It may take a few months to see some movement and the movement may be very slight, but it should definitely be there. By starting reporting at the start of the campaign (or even before it begins) you will have a baseline to measure improvements by. The industry standard reporting tool is Google Analytics, since it is data straight from the source. It’s free to set up a Google Analytics account and by adding the code to your site it provides you with a wealth of information.
The following SEO reports can be used to determine success:
Organic Visitors
While SEO is now much more far reaching as a way to market your business on the web, the primary purpose of SEO is still to improve the search engine visibility of your website. When the visibility improves for targeted keywords, the number of visitors coming from the search engines should also improve. Of course, this can fluctuate month to month (especially if there is a seasonality to the product or service that you provide) but over an extended period of time there should be a noticeable trend upward.
All Visitors
This report will tell you what all of the referral sites that are sending traffic over to your site. These visitors can be attributed to many factors, but one of the factors is SEO since SEO works as a marketing tool to improve brand visibility across the web. Some of the referral sites should be sites that you have actively been building links on for SEO purposes. Link building helps to gain search engine trust, but the ultimate goal is to build links that will also deliver traffic to your site. It’s likely that there will also be links from referral sites that occurred naturally. Those sites could be a target for additional link-building.
Keywords
The keywords that are delivering traffic to your site should correlate with the keywords that are being targeted in the SEO campaign. If this is the case, and the keywords all make sense, it’s an indication that the campaign is on track. You may also see some great long tail keywords that you can begin to utilize when creating content. It’s common for the top keywords to be branded. It doesn’t mean that the SEO campaign is a failure; it simply means that you have a strong brand!
Social Media
Social media marketing is now a necessary component of an SEO campaign, which is why social media reports are essential. Content that is shared in social media helps generate “social signals” that convey trust to the search engines. Social media reports will tell you what social networks your target audience is most active on and where you should put your social media focus.
Categorized in: SEO
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