SEO campaigns should be an important part of your business’s marketing strategy. But how do you know they’re working? Check out these 3 metrics to measure ROI.
Over 90% of users choose a link from the first page of a Google search engine results page. If your digital marketing strategy doesn’t include SEO campaigns, you’re losing out to your competitors.
That said, hiring an SEO expert for your marketing team isn’t cheap. And an SEO management firm is even more expensive. As a marketing manager, the way you can you justify spending on an SEO expert is by explaining it to your CFO in a way that they will understand. By showing them the return on investment.
Unlike PPC advertising where you can track data directly related to campaigns, it can take months before any changes from SEO strategies can be seen. Read on to learn about some of the metrics that can be used to measure SEO performance.
1. SEO Campaigns Lead to an Increase in Non-Branded Traffic
Non-branded traffic refers to users who search for a keyword related to your business without using your brand name. For example, imagine a company that specialises in product photography in Portsmouth. They want to see that traffic from related search queries is increasing.
You can find traffic stats based on search queries under the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics. Next, select “Organic Keywords” from the campaigns section and then exclude your brand name. By monitoring this metric from month to month, you will be able to track whether your SEO team’s efforts are increasing organic traffic.
2. Improvement in Quality of Website Traffic
Once you’ve looked into your traffic numbers, the next step is to monitor the quality of traffic that your website is receiving. It isn’t helpful to your business if the traffic increase is coming from search queries that don’t lead to sales.
You can assess the quality of traffic your website is receiving by looking at the “Behaviour” tab in Google Analytics. Things like page depth and session duration are key metrics for traffic quality. Look for visitors who leave your website quickly or without engaging with your content. This tells you that you’re optimizing for the wrong keywords.
3. Increase in Incoming Backlinks
Backlinks form the backbone of SEO. Google cracked down on this a few years ago and now backlinks must come from websites with a high domain authority in order to benefit your SEO. That said, building backlinks should be one of the main components of your marketing team’s SEO strategy.
This means that month on month, the number of backlinks pointing to your website should be increasing. For this metric, Google Analytics is not as good. It can tell you the number of sites that are linking to you but doesn’t give any information about those sites. There are many online tools that can give you a more comprehensive backlinks report.
Is SEO Worth the Investment?
If you don’t understand SEO, it can be frustrating as a business owner to be investing in SEO campaigns and not see immediate changes. It’s important to understand that improving your SEO ranking takes time and at the same time, you’re competitors are working to improve their rankings as well.
Contact us if you have any questions about your current digital marketing strategy or if you’re looking for an SEO management firm improve your current SEO performance.
