How To Measure SEO Success

Measuring SEO success can be challenging because its benefits often unfold over time, creating ongoing revenue rather than immediate results. Unlike paid advertising, which offers quick and easily trackable returns, SEO typically delivers long-term value and requires patience.

While it’s tempting to focus solely on numbers, SEO also requires a qualitative approach that is harder to quantify but equally important. A robust approach to measuring SEO success should include both qualitative and quantitative insights.

The way you track SEO performance also depends on your business goals, the stage of your website’s development, and the resources you have available. In this guide, we’ll cover key SEO metrics to monitor and point out common pitfalls to avoid, ensuring your strategy is effectively driving business growth.

Metric #1: Organic Traffic

While boosting organic traffic is a common goal for many businesses, it’s crucial to look beyond just the numbers. More traffic isn’t always better if it’s not attracting the right audience. Let’s break it down:

Relevance of Traffic

If you notice an increase in clicks, take time to analyse which keywords are driving the surge. Likewise, if clicks have decreased, check the keywords behind the drop. Are these keywords relevant to your business? A decline in clicks for irrelevant terms isn’t always a bad thing, just as an increase in irrelevant traffic doesn’t mean your SEO is on the right track.

Quality or Intent of Traffic

What type of traffic are you attracting? Examine the intent behind the keywords driving your clicks. SEMRush identifies four types of search intent: navigational, informational, commercial, and transactional. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but a winning strategy aligns your focus with the keywords that deliver the most value to your business.

Focusing on the Right Keywords

You may want to focus on informational keywords if:

• Your site is new, and you need to build authority and visibility
• You can’t rank for commercial and transactional keywords as they are too competitive
• You sell high-consideration products or services, like financial services, enterprise software, or legal services, where customers need more information before converting

You may want to focus on commercial and transactional keywords if:

• You’re an e-commerce site
• You can compete effectively for these keywords
• Your audience is ready to buy, and you want to optimise for conversions to drive revenue or leads

More traffic doesn’t always mean better results. For example, an increase in informational traffic for an e-commerce site selling low-consideration products might not have any business value. 

It’s important to ensure that the traffic you’re driving matches your business goals, whether that’s building trust and authority through informational content or driving conversions with transactional keywords.

Metric #2: Organic Conversions

Although organic traffic and conversions often go hand in hand, more traffic doesn’t always lead to more conversions. Conversions are a crucial metric because they connect your SEO efforts with real business outcomes. Whether it’s purchases, phone calls, or booked meetings, conversions reflect the actions that drive revenue. If your goal is brand awareness, you might track different conversions, such as newsletter sign-ups.

However, many factors beyond SEO can affect organic conversions and revenue, including:

• Product or service quality
• Pricing
• Product availability
• Branding
• Market trends

Since SEO is a long-term strategy, remember that focusing heavily on conversions early on may not provide a clear picture of your progress, especially in a competitive industry.

Metric #3: Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings are often recognised as a good indicator of SEO success. However, they can also be misleading if not properly analysed. Here’s why:

• Ranking improvements for a small set of keywords can paint an incomplete picture
  • SEO isn’t about a few isolated terms; a website can rank for thousands of keywords. Judging performance based on a handful of improvements may not reflect the overall health or organic visibility of the site, unless those keywords are core to your business and drive valuable traffic.
• Some SEOs focus on cherry-picking easy-to-rank keywords that provide little business value
  • And if they aren’t providing any – do they really matter?
• Big ranking jumps don’t always translate into meaningful results
  • Moving from position 90 to position 30 might look impressive, but being on the third page of search results will still deliver minimal traffic.

To avoid these common pitfalls and ensure you’re using keyword rankings the right way to measure SEO success, focus on the bigger picture:

1. Look beyond rankings 
   • When it comes to measuring SEO success, don’t just rely on one metric. Start by matching ranking changes with changes in organic traffic and conversions. Do they tell the same story?
2. Prioritise keywords that drive business value 
   • Ensure the keywords you’re tracking aren’t just easy to rank for, but actually lead to conversions, leads, or meaningful engagement with your brand.
3. Ensure keyword rankings are matched to the intended pages
   • If your keyword rankings have improved, make sure it’s the right page ranking for that keyword. For example, when it comes to transactional keywords, you’d want to have a product category or product page rank, rather than a blog post.
4. Track a wide range of relevant keywords 
   • Don’t just focus on a few top terms. Monitor how your site performs across a broad set of keywords, especially those that align with your target audience and business goals.
5. Evaluate keyword trends over time
   • The SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are dynamic and can fluctuate over time, so regular monitoring over an extended period allows for more reliable measurement.

Metric #4: Impressions

According to Google, an impression means that a user has seen (or potentially seen) a link to your site, even if the user does not click through.

Generally, Google counts an impression each time a link to your site appears on the current page of search results for a user, even if that link is not scrolled into view.

This makes impressions an important metric for understanding your site’s visibility in search results.

And while clicks represent actual traffic (and are therefore more meaningful), impressions are key as a leading indicator of SEO performance. They help you track early signs of increased visibility, which can later lead to more clicks.

Tracking Impressions at a Page Level

When you publish a new page, especially on a site with lower authority, it’s normal not to see any clicks right away. What you should look for instead is a steady increase in impressions. This suggests that your page is starting to rank for relevant queries and is on its way to earning more clicks as it climbs higher in search results. More impressions signal progress, but clicks are the end goal.

Tracking Impressions Sitewide

Monitoring sitewide impressions gives you a snapshot of your entire website’s visibility in search results. Consistent growth in impressions means your content is being shown to more users, which is encouraging if they are tied to relevant keywords. However, it’s crucial to remember that impressions alone don’t guarantee traffic, so monitoring clicks along with impressions can give you a better understanding, especially for a more established website.

Monitoring both sitewide impressions and page-level impressions for your key pages can give you a clearer picture of your website’s visibility and progress.

Summary

Measuring SEO success is a complex process that goes beyond simply tracking traffic and keyword rankings. While these metrics are important, it’s important to look at how your SEO efforts align with broader business goals, whether that’s driving conversions or building brand awareness.

By incorporating a wide range of metrics and applying the right focus based on the situation, you can better gauge SEO performance and ensure your efforts are driving real business results and long-term success.

This is the approach we take at Arcadian Digital, where we build customised SEO strategies focused on driving business growth. Get in touch today to see how we can help.