SEO Success: How Do You Know You’re “Winning” the Search Game?

How do you know you are succeeding with your SEO efforts? Your search rank when you search for a specific keyword will tell you – but it doesn’t tell the whole story. There are other metrics by which you can measure the efficacy of both your content and your methods of driving your audience to it.

You can informally decide you’re doing well because people are completing calls to action, but delve a little deeper. Create specific goals – signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, requesting additional information, etc. — and track them on Google Analytics. If you are seeing a healthy conversion rate, keep up the good work. If not, you can start finding where people drop out of the sales funnel and addressing those issues.

Your overall conversions may not be so hot because your traffic levels are not so hot. Look at visitors over a period of time and see if it is trending up, down, or flat. Are more people coming to your site now than before you instituted a particular SEO policy? Are you getting repeat visitors who are coming back because of the quality, interesting, relevant content? If not, you need to strengthen that. If you’re getting a lot of one-off traffic, rethink your content strategy. It’s all about content.

You might also start seeing that your site makes more than one appearance in the SERPs. A “double listing” indicates that content on different pages of your site is relevant to a particular search. This, in turn, should increase conversion rates.

There are a variety of ways to gauge SEO success – but they give us a quick snapshot in time. You can’t rest on your number 1 rank for long; you’ve got to provide content for voracious searchers that is of high-quality and which is properly optimised. Keep measuring, keep tweaking, and keep producing to remain relevant in the eyes of Google.