How Do You Tell If Your SEO Is Working?

Search engine ranking

People invest a lot of money in online marketing, so it’s only natural that they want to see quantified evidence measuring their success. Thankfully, there are SEO reporting programs like Google analytics, which allows you to track things like any changes in Google rankings.

The first step towards measuring your Internet marketing campaign’s success is choosing which SEO reporting software you want to use. Most online marketing firms offer their clients an SEO reporting tool, but if you’re doing your Search Engine Optimization either alone or in-house, then you can find minimally priced tools from a number of different web hosting companies.

Secondly, once you’ve got the software, establish a baseline by taking note and recording of the first measurements prior to the campaign. If your campaign is already underway, then make note of where things stand at the time. You’re going to use this data to measure changes in the website that should occur as a direct result of Internet marketing efforts.

Now, you’re ready to judge your Internet marketing’s efficacy. It’s important to analyze and gauge several different aspects of SEO effectiveness because they correlate with each other. In order to have a complete picture, you naturally have to look at everything. The SEO reporting tool should provide with such data as traffic, keyword ranking metrics, and other helpful evidence.

The keyword rank metrics allow you to see how your site ranks compared to others when specific keywords are searched. These keywords are absolutely paramount for success, and can be finely tuned to maximize the optimization of your site. For example, “best pizza shop” might not rank well, but “fastest pizza delivery” might rake in a whole ton of traffic. Some keywords that your site uses might not get picked up by search engines, however, and you can use the SEO reporting software to view this keyword indexing metrics. The more key phrases that search engines index, the better.

While this data shows how well your campaign brings people in to the site, as a business owner you’re probably more concerned with the bottom line, I.E. how many web visitors convert into customers. Thankfully, SEO reporting software does allow you to measure any increases or decreases in conversion yielded by your marketing. To do so, simply divide the total number of visitors of your site by the total number of sales. For example, if your site gets 1,000 hits and 10 sales, then you net one sale per every 100 visits.

SEO reporting tools are vital to anyone marketing on the web. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

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