George S. SEO Expert

How to check the efficiency of website SEO promotion

SEO is one of the most powerful channels of targeted traffic. But, like other marketing tools, it only works if set up correctly. The effectiveness of promotion cannot be assessed by any one indicator. Only the growth of positions or only the increase in traffic does not mean anything if the level of sales remains at the same level as it was. Moreover, traffic can be non-targeted, and top positions for keywords that no one is looking for. To get an objective picture, you need to analyze several KPIs. And in this article we will tell you what metrics you need to focus on in order to evaluate the results of search promotion.

Key metrics for evaluating SEO performance:

- visibility

- positions

- attendance

- behavioral factors and conversion

Visibility

Visibility is one of the main KPIs in SEO. Evaluating this indicator allows you to understand what proportion of users will see the site in search results for certain keywords. The higher the positions and the more frequent the requests, the better the visibility, which means more people will be able to find your resource in the search results. But by itself, the number does not say anything. To verify the effectiveness of promotion, you need to compare:

- the dynamics of the site's visibility over different periods of time;

- visibility of your resource with competitors' sites.

This is the only way to understand how good the chosen SEO strategy is and whether it works at all. And as a bonus, find missed requests that competitors are advancing on.

Positions

This is the most common measure of SEO performance. To track it, you need to initially collect a list of the main targets for promoting requests and upload them to a position checking service. The frequency of checking this KPI depends on the size of the resource and the activity of the work being done. When analyzing, it is important to pay attention to:

- the general dynamics of growth or decline in positions;

- the entry of the selected requests in the TOP-10, TOP-3, TOP-1.

Such an assessment will allow you to understand what actions led to changes and which pages need to be worked on more diligently.

Attendance

Search engine traffic is the main indicator of SEO performance. It is checked using Google Analytics counters. They allow you to:

- compare traffic from organic search results in different periods of time;

- analyze the audience and understand how targeted it is (gender, age, region, etc.);

- evaluate user behavior (session duration, number of pages viewed, bounce rate).

Additionally, in Google Search Console, you can check what queries users used to find your site and go to it. They can be:

1. Branded and non-branded To evaluate the effectiveness of SEO promotion, you need to track them separately. Since the growth of brand traffic can be associated with successful work to increase company awareness or launch an advertising campaign.

2. Informational and commercial The growth of the latter indicates the effectiveness of promoting commercial pages. However, this is only part of the work as in the future, the percentage of conversions for each of the pages is calculated. An increase in informational requests indicates the successful blogging or article section of the site. If the block was not purposefully developed, but there is an increase in information traffic, a group of growing requests is analyzed. Further optimization of articles is carried out in order to increase traffic volumes. In addition, conversion elements are added to the blog, for example, selling banners, feedback forms, links to popular products / services.

3. Targeted and non-targeted The first are those keywords that contribute to the achievement of the goal like sales, subscriptions, etc. Non-target, on the contrary, complicate this process. So, for example, if you sell goods at retail, requests with the word wholesale will be untargeted. If there are user transitions on them, you need to check the content of the pages and fix it.

Behavioral factors and conversion

These KPIs are also important to take into account in SEO, but they depend not only on how targeted queries were used for promotion. Here also plays a role:

- usability;

- site design;

- presented assortment;

- prices and terms of purchase;

- completeness of information about the company;

- reviews and other data that are important for creating a positive user experience.

If you see that traffic from search engines is growing, but there are no more orders, perhaps the reason is the poor design of the internal component of the site or the insufficient amount of information necessary to make a decision. You can check behavioral factors and set up conversion tracking in analytics services. Webvisor recordings will help you find resource weaknesses and understand what prevented users from taking a targeted action.

Additionally, you can track the conversion of leads into sales. However, in that case, the result is less dependent on the effectiveness of promoting an online resource. The reason may lie in the insufficiently good work of the sales department.

Conclusions

SEO performance can and even needs to be tracked using multiple KPIs at the same time. This will allow not only to check the quality of the work done, but also to find new points of growth for the project.

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