If that's the case, it's best to schedule a consultation with a professional SEO agency that should be able to guide you through the basic concepts. For a reasonable price, a reputable SEO company can perform an audit of your website, identify pre-existing weaknesses in your website, analyze your competition, and provide you with a high-level overview of what you would be facing and the KPIs for SEO that you need. They can also use their experience to help you create realistic goals based on data and research.
Analysis tools you'll need to know if your SEO is working
To understand how to measure SEO results on your website, you'll need to use analysis tools to gather data. While there's no easy and quick way to know if SEO is working or not, these tools offer analysis that will help you determine if your SEO is on the right track.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the best tools for getting information about your website, and it's not just used for tracking website traffic.
You can use it to track other indicators such as how long users typically spend on a specific page, what the page's bounce rate is, and how many conversions each page produces.
2. Ahrefs
Before using Ahrefs to track keyword ranking, you should first incorporate valuable keywords into your content. To do your keyword research, you can use tools such as Moz's Keyword Explorer or Keywordtool.io.
Ahrefs is an invaluable tool for tracking your keyword ranking.
Enter your URL in the search bar and you'll see data on the organic keywords, backlinks, and more of that page.
To see how you're ranking for keywords, click on the blue number that shows your number of organic keywords in the top data bar.
From there, you'll see the keywords for which your website is ranking, how many searches each one receives per month, how difficult it is to rank for each keyword, its position in the search results pages, and more.
All this information is useful to know how well your SEO strategy is working. If you see that you're better ranked for many keywords, you know that your strategy is on the right track.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush offers crucial information on how your SEO campaign is working with data such as your website's organic search traffic, paid search traffic, the number of backlinks your website has and the number of organic keywords, just to name a few.
With this information, you can make a pretty accurate conclusion of whether or not your SEO efforts are working.
If you see that the number of organic keywords on your website is also increasing, it's safe to assume that you're targeting the right keywords for your industry and using them successfully in your content.
4. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing and sales CRM platform. The HubSpot Marketing CMS Hub has a useful SEO recommendations tool that provides advice and analysis of your website.
For the CMS itself, HubSpot offers file hosting capabilities, dynamic content, a blog platform, forms, landing pages and file uploads.
In this CMS, you will get practical recommendations on how to optimize your site for SEO, ranked in order of priority to show which optimizations will have the biggest impact on your search performance. See exactly which pages need to be updated, what actions need to be taken, and observe how your site's SEO improves, with keyword proposals.
These KPI or key performance indicators, reflect the overall success of your SEO campaigns.
To view your KPI by numbers you can use tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs.
When the traffic to your website increases, the time on the page increases, the bounce rate decreases, and conversions increase, then the SEO work is bearing fruit.
1. Organic traffic: web traffic analysis
One of the most important metrics to measure SEO results is organic traffic. This is because this number represents all the visitors your site attracts solely from organic and natural search that people make from Google.
After all, one of the main goals of any SEO strategy is to improve its visibility in search results related to your business and industry, and it makes sense that if you are successful, the amount of visitors you attract from search results should constantly increase.
And accessing this information is easy in Google Analytics.
By default, this report will show your site's organic traffic during the previous month. You can see your total number of sessions, as well as how that number fluctuated throughout the month.
And as you develop your strategy, month-to-month and year-over-year reports are an excellent way to visualize the long-term impact that your SEO has on your site.
2. CTR (Click Through Rate)
Your CTR, or click-through rate, indicates the percentage of searchers that visit your site after seeing one of your pages in search results.
For example, if ten different users saw one of your pages ranked in Google's results for a particular keyword, but only one of them clicked and visited your site, your CTR would be 10%.
This metric is one of the best indicators of the effectiveness of your pages in capturing the attention of users in search results.
As a result, it's also a solid indicator of the quality of your site's title tags and meta descriptions.
After all, when one of your pages appears in search, these are the elements that are displayed and are used by searchers to determine whether they want to visit that page.
So if your click-through rates are low, this could be an indicator that your title tags and meta descriptions need some work.
Therefore, the lower the ranking of your site in search, the lower you should expect your CTR to be. But monitoring this metric is a good way to track your performance over time.
And if it doesn't increase, you know you have work to do.
3. Keyword rankings
This metric is relatively straightforward.
As you work to improve your site's ranking for the keywords that are important to your business, it makes sense that you would want to track how your rankings for those keywords change.
You can choose to do this manually for some of your most important keywords. After all, simply doing a Google search for those keywords will show you exactly where you rank.
But beyond that, you can get a more comprehensive view of your rankings by using a tool like SEMrush or HubSpot.
For example, if you open the Organic Search Positions report, you'll see an overview of all the keywords that your site ranks for and the positions in which it ranks.
Checking this report regularly is an excellent way to monitor changes in ranking over time and evaluate how you're improving your search visibility overall.
Be careful with broad or keywords you think are too "selling"! In this video, Sofia Coppola, responsible for developing the SEO strategy for HubSpot's Spanish content, who was invited to one of our Hugs, tells us why to avoid short, broad and keywords that don't help your business.
4. Domain authority
One of the most important goals of any SEO strategy is to improve the site's level of authority in the eyes of Google, that is, checking the web positioning.
And while trying to measure this impact based on the links obtained would be almost impossible, tools like the Website Authority Checker simplify the process.
Enter the domain name of your site and you will see a number on a scale of one to 100 indicating the authority of your site according to its backlink profile.
Monitoring this number is an easy way to measure the impact of your link building strategy and can help you measure how your site's level of credibility improves over time.
5. New backlinks and referral domains
In addition to measuring your site's domain authority, it can also be useful to monitor the number of incoming links and referral domains to your site.
And if you're not familiar with this distinction, it's important to make it.
While the number of incoming links (or backlinks) includes all links pointing to your site, the number of referral domains represents the number of unique domains from which you have incoming links.
And while each link you gain has the potential to improve your authority, links from new domains will almost always have a greater impact than links from sites that already link to you.
Therefore, including these two numbers in your reports can give you a more complete view of the results in link building.
6. Page Speed
User experience plays an important role in your site's ability to rank well and convert visitors into customers, and one of the most important factors in the experience that your site provides is page speed.
Therefore, as you optimize your site, it's important to keep an eye on whether your changes have an impact on your loading times.
Thankfully, this is an easy metric to monitor using Google's Page Speed Insights.
Conversions
User experience plays an important role in your site's ability to rank well and convert visitors into customers, and one of the most important factors in the experience that your site provides is page speed.
Therefore, as you optimize your site, it's important to keep an eye on whether your changes have an impact on your loading times.
Thankfully, this is an easy metric to monitor using Google's Page Speed Insights.
Google constantly updates its search algorithm.
These algorithm changes are out of the control of any website owner, but they do improve search results for Google users.
There are updates that combat piracy, increase the importance of mobile compatibility, and devalue bad links, just to name a few.
Unless Google is rolling out a big update, you won't know when they make these kinds of changes, which means you could see a lot of fluctuations in your SEO results while the update is being applied.
Fortunately, these updates don't affect most websites very often. The best way to handle algorithm changes is to follow modern SEO guidelines as closely as possible to minimize the chance of being harmed by an update and maximize the chance of getting help.
2. Competition
The competition is always changing. If you implement SEO to increase your position on search results pages, your competitors are probably doing the same. Everyone wants the top position in Google for a specific keyword, and that makes it harder for you to rank #1.
This can also affect how you view growth because your competitors might be improving their SEO at any given time.
When your competitors change their SEO approach, your ranking fluctuates just the same. Fortunately, you can use the tools that we recommend to constantly monitor the page of your competitors.
3. Behavior of the search engine
SEO results also have to do with how search engine users behave online. The reason the top search results on Google rank high is because Google takes note of the way users interact with your website.
Websites that satisfy users and focus on information they find useful, among other factors, generally rank higher than websites that don't. This means that any fluctuations in search engine behavior could affect how you see SEO results.
This can cause your ranking to fluctuate because customers are looking for other things. It can also give you a poor idea of your ranking throughout the year if you are just starting your SEO efforts while customers are buying more.
If you have a website that sells swimwear at a discount price, your sales are likely to increase in the month leading up to the holidays and during the first few months of the year. However, in the other months, it will surely be more difficult to attract them.
Remember: SEO is a collection of tactics (content, technical SEO, link building, even website safety and usability) that ensures your website is easy for search engines to understand.
Do you know if your SEO is working?
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