Starting a new SEO campaign is exciting. This is when you get to invest in creating and promoting great content. You can also restructure your website so the Search Engines react to your website. Once you’ve invested the work you can watch yourself being rewarded. At this point you may wonder how you can tell if all this is working or not though.
Defining “Working”
“Working” is a vague term that means different things to different people. You need to define what this means for your business based on the following factors:
- Your campaign’s main goals may include improving on where you’re already ranked, ranking higher, or getting more traffic. Secondarily you may be seeking a monetary return, more brand exposure, or help with your content marketing campaign. Additionally, you should think about what kind of results you’re hoping to see (e.g. a specific level of traffic volume).
- It’s important to understand that you won’t see the results of your SEO campaign right away. You’re employing a long-term strategy here that won’t provide many results until you’ve been working at it for a while.
- You need to set reasonable expectations for the results you expect to see based on the amount of time you’re investing. The more time and money you spend, the greater your results will be.
Key Metrics to Consider
When it comes to metrics and numbers, each business must determine for themselves whether their SEO campaign is working. This is usually based on things like:
- When you’re creating a new SEO campaign it usually starts with keywords. While these are helpful to the search engine, they aren’t the only thing you need to be concerned about.
- Inbound links are an indicator of how your reputation is growing. They also tell other people that your content is worth linking to.
- Organic traffic is better than keyword rankings alone. This is the number of people who visit your website once they find it in the search engines. Therefore, you can use this to know how many people are really visiting your site, how visible your site is, and how much traction you’re getting too.
- Referral traffic is an important consideration when you’re building external links. This is a powerful indication of how well your off-site content is doing.
- Conversions occur as your content funnels your visitors into conversion opportunities. This is how you can check how well your content is doing overall.
- Revenue is a direct extension of your conversions. When you measure this, you’ll be able to determine your overall ROI and whether your efforts are profitable.
What Type of Growth You Should Expect
Now that you know what to expect, you may still wonder just how much growth you should expect when you dedicate a reasonable budget to your SEO campaign. This depends on how long you’ve been working on it though.
During the first month you probably won’t see any results regardless of how much money you spend. The work you need to invest here may lead to minimal improvement in your on-site optimization though.
After the first year you’ll be way ahead of where you were initially. In fact, you may even make a positive ROI. Things will probably level off after the second year unless you continue to make improvements that will sustain your results and tweak things for new algorithms as they’re rolled out.
When you find that your SEO campaign isn’t working, or you want to take it to the next level, contact us at Affordable SEO Company. We can help you get the results you want by making some adjustments in what you’ve already spent time doing.