A guide to measuring SEO success

There’s much more to SEO than keyword rankings

Rankings do not guarantee more business.  Usually they help – especially if your website is ranking for relevant search terms that your target audience actually uses – but they’re not the be all and end all when it comes to measuring SEO.

Don’t get me wrong; if you sell jam doughnut flavoured biscuits and you rank first on Google for ‘jammy biscuits’, that’s fantastic.  However, for this to definitely be successful first you need to make sure that is your true position and secondly, you need to know that people are actually searching for jammy biscuits.

Many businesses will visit their own website five times a day to make changes to text, or just to look something up.  Surprise, surprise, when they use a website browser like Google Chrome to search for ‘jammy biscuits’ their website is of course on the first page.  Google knows theirs is the website they’re most likely to be looking for, so to offer that person a great user experience as a Google user, it puts that website in front of them.

Very, rarely is that where a website would rank if someone external to the company (with a different IP address) was searching for the same term.  They won’t have visited the jam doughnut flavoured biscuit website lots of times – it’s a fresh search for them.

How to find out your true rankings

My personal favourite way to check search engine rankings is by using a tool that I’ve verified (by later going and physically checking search results myself) called Serplab.  Not only will this tool measure where your website ranks in searches, it will keep a record of its best position and whether it has gone up or down since your last search.

The best thing though, is that Serplab will show you which page on your website is the one that’s ranking – so if you’ve created a landing page specifically to attract traffic from niche keywords, it will show you if this is the one that shows up in searches, or whether it’s only your homepage that ranks.

This obviously helps you with your SEO strategy as well as your wider website user experience, because if someone searching for ‘double stack jammy biscuits’ doesn’t land on the double stacked biscuits page, but on your homepage instead, they’re then going to have to carry out another search while on your website to finally set eyes on the biscuits themselves.

Measuring page performance

Leading on nicely from landing pages; how well a page performs is another excellent way to track SEO success.  Whether you’re measuring one page, a set of pages or your entire website, Google Analytics (GA) is the tool you need.

There’s so much I could say about GA so I’m going to stick to a few key pointers:

Key things to measure in Google Analytics include:

Organic traffic

Has the amount of traffic to your website increased?  Take a look at your website’s sources of traffic and how well organic search is doing to deliver visitors.  It’s a good idea to keep a record of this each month so that you can see whether various SEO activities make a difference.  For example, if since updating all of the headings on your website six months ago traffic has slowly increased, you can roughly attribute your actions to this success.

Similarly, if you have had a drop in search traffic, you can audit your website and go back to your records of actions from when the drop happened, to find out what caused it.

Top tip: if your website’s search engine position hasn’t dropped in all search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) then it may be that you’ve been penalised by one.  However, bear in mind what works well for one search engine does not automatically work well for them all – some focus more on link building and on-page content whilst others rank your website based on whether the content is well optimised and organised.  As always, the bottom line is that you should create your website content based on what would be best for the user landing on it.

Organic conversions

How many conversions (sales/enquiries/sign-ups/downloads) are you receiving as a direct result of organic traffic?  Has this increased over the last month or in comparison to the same time last year?  Also, have conversions from search engine traffic gone up since you started focusing on a set of keywords?

Likewise, if your conversions are decreasing whilst your website traffic is increasing, this is a good indicator that your website is attracting a poor quality of traffic – or in other words, people visiting your site aren’t the ones that you want  there, because they’re not converting.  At this point, you need to check two things.  Firstly, is the user experience on your site good enough to point them in the right direction to convert?  If so, the other thing to do is to find out what users are searching for to land on your website and use this information to reshape your keyword strategy.

Landing pages

Are the landing pages that you’ve created as part of an SEO strategy generating traffic?  You should keep an eye on these and report on them, whilst also keeping track of how many pages in total attract people to ‘land’ on your website.  If these go up – good, if they go down, you may want to check that all of your website’s pages are still being indexed by search engines.

Average visit duration

If people spend too little or too long on your website, that’s a bad sign.  Too little can be an indicator that the content on your site isn’t what they are looking for, whilst too long could be an indicator that they are getting confused, distracted or simply can’t find what they are after

Find out the average time that the sessions resulting in conversions are.  This is the starting point for working out your most ideal visit duration.  From here, you can find out which landing pages attract people who spend this length of time on site and track the journey they take from those landing pages to conversions.  It sounds far more complicated than it is and this information is accessible within just a few clicks.

Bounce rate

Similar to visit duration, if your bounce rate is increasing this can mean that people landing on your website think ‘oh, that’s not what I was looking for’ and click straight off of it without even taking a look around.  Of course that’s not always the real story; a person could just be looking for your telephone number (and if so, they’ll at least spend a few seconds on your website to copy this down).

In the first case, not providing the right solution to the search makes your website look pretty bad to search engines.  From their point of view, they ranked your website highly and in doing so put their faith in your website to provide the best answer to the searcher’s question.  By not providing the answer needed, you’ve made the search engine look poor to its user, by not providing what is required.  If this keeps happening, the higher your website’s bounce rate will get and the more it will start to slip down in rankings.

You can learn how to reduce your bounce rate here.

Page load time

SEO auditors absolutely love to pick apart a website with pages that take more than a few seconds to load.  It’s because we know how badly this is going to reflect on a website.  Google’s John Mueller is quoted as saying: “We’re seeing an extremely high response time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL).  This has resulted in us severely limiting the number of URLs we’ll crawl from your site.”

If you have a slow site, Google will either take its time crawling it, or not crawl all of it.  It’s just not a priority.

Good for Google I say.  Gone are the days when people were happy to sit and wait for dial-up internet.  If a page doesn’t load now it’s a case of, ‘See-ya website, we’re off to click on the next one down’.  Too slow equals lost user – it’s just too frustrating to wait when what they’re looking can probably be found by clicking back to Google and on to the next result (all in less time than it takes for a slow page to load).

Search Console

Google Search Console is another wonderful tool offering valuable SEO measurement insights.  Not only can you see the keywords that your website is appearing in search results for (called ‘impressions’), you can measure its click through rate against those terms.  This is extremely helpful to convey opportunity areas and also to show you where you’re going wrong by ranking for irrelevant terms.

Another fantastic aspect of Search Console is reviewing the links to your website from other websites.  Here, you can tell Google to ignore (disavow) the ones that you don’t want to be associated with, such as spammy accounts or sites that simply aren’t relevant.

You can also keep track of high value links to make sure that they’re not lost when you make changes to the structure of your website, or if you decide to migrate your website’s content over to a new design.

Links to your website

Google is one search engine that places a high value on good quality, relevant links pointing to a website.  Sometimes it’s better to have fewer links from lots of relevant websites and at other times it’s better to have lots of links from a few select websites.

What’s important to mention here is that buying links is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behaviour that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”  See Google’s search console help for examples of link schemes that if identified by Google, will have a negative impact on your website’s search rankings.

In addition to tracking links to your website through Search Console, there are some excellent online tools that help with this.  One of my favourites is SEMrush because you can also investigate the types of links that competitors have.

Domain authority

This measurement factor does what it says on the tin – it indicates how much authority your website’s domain holds.  Developed by Moz, individual website’s domain authority scores are calculated by taking the age, popularity and size of a website into account.  Differing level of credibility are given to domain authority, depending on who you ask, but in my opinion it’s a good metric to keep track of, alongside your competitors’.

Summary of SEO success

The above methods are just some of the ways to measure the success of your SEO efforts.  There are many more tools and metrics that are just as useful, if not more so, depending on your individual SEO goals.

What’s important with measuring SEO, as with any marketing, is to set objectives, put a plan into place and work out what success looks like before you get going.  This will enable you to effectively analyse whether your SEO is working and if it’s not, to see where you need to make changes.