SEO is an online marketing function that is built for the long term. If you start SEO one month, there’s a very small chance that you are going to see much improvement the next month. However, as the SEO campaign moves along and you are producing SEO content and generating quality inbound links you should start to see some positive things start to happen. Getting analytics up and running on the site is necessary in order to measure campaign success. Google analytics is the industry standard. After all, it’s information that’s coming straight from the source.

Here are 5 key metrics that provide insights regarding SEO campaign success:

Organic visitor growth:

This is the most obvious one. The number one purpose of an SEO campaign is to gain visibility for related keyword searches on the search engine results page in order to generate more traffic from the search engines. Google Analytics allows you to segment traffic sources a number of ways, and “non-paid search” is the top option when measuring SEO success. There may be peaks and valleys depending on seasonality, but overall there should be an upward trend, even if it’s minor to start.

All visitor growth:

Sure, the purpose of SEO is to generate traffic from the search engines. But it’s also to build brand awareness and visibility across the web. The SEO activities that you implement not only will allow a website to gain search engine trust, but will also be noticed by target audience members and should generate traffic. For example, if an optimized blog post is shared in social media, it could result in a visitor straight from social media as opposed to the search engines, but it still can be attributed to SEO efforts.

Number of traffic sources:

While link building may have changed over the past few years, it’s still a necessary component of SEO. The key is to build links on sites that are relevant, high quality, and generate traffic from target audience members. As you build links in these places that are visible to those that are interested in the products or services that you offer, you should also be generating traffic from these sites and the number of traffic sources should increase.

Number of keywords that generated visitors:

One of the first things that needs to happen in an SEO campaign is that relevant keywords need to be researched, selected, and implemented into on site content. Instead of using the same keywords on every page, it’s important to target a variety of keywords including long tail variations. These long tail variations may not have a high search volume but they can generate visits from target audience members that are looking for something specific and are further along in the sales cycle.

Website conversions:

Generating traffic is the first step, but ultimately you want visitors to your site to take some kind of action and convert. The conversion could be a sale on the site, filling out a lead form, calling the office, etc. If an SEO campaign is on track it will generate not just any kind of traffic, but qualified traffic that is more likely to convert.

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