“Website visitors from search engines” is the sole key performance indicator (KPI) that can be used to measure the success of your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Before we get too-into-the-weeds, let’s recap.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO”, is the on-going process of optimizing your website to attract high quality traffic from search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. By optimizing your site for these search engines, you’ll have a higher chance of appearing when a user searches for a term related to your business.
A primary goal of SEO is to rank in the number one position on Google after a user conducts a search. There are several opportunities to snap a prominent position in a Google search result, on the page, in the “Local Three Pack with Maps”, as the answer to “People Also Ask” section, and related videos or images. For a more in depth discussion on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Measuring Your SEO Efforts
There are dozens of factors that contribute to your website’s rankings with search engines.
In no specific order, here is a handful of critical factors that definitely play a role in determining your SEO ranking:
Website security – make sure your website has an SSL certificate
Mobile friendliness (how does your website perform on mobile?)
Website meta data optimizations
Website performance
Content (blogs, videos, photos)
Keywords
Backlinks
Business Info
Business Listings
Reviews
Social Media
Domain Authority
There are countless tools and agencies that will provide you with an SEO “score”, SEO “rating”, local listing rating, backlink analysis, and keyword quality score. While measuring each of the elements of an SEO plan is important to ensure that you’re making progress and not wasting resources, the final and only measure of ultimate SEO success is that you get more website visitors from search engines.
SEO programs take time It can take 3-6 months and in some cases, up to a year to see meaningful, sustained increases in traffic from search engines. So when looking at the metric of visitors from search engines, adjust your time frame and look at several time frames.
There are many items that you can address yourself. First things first, you need the ability to see the results of your efforts.
While total number of visitors is the ultimate measure, you need to analyze this in the context of where all your traffic is coming from.
These factors don’t mean much if you don’t know how to implement them. Some website providers will offer out-of-the-box solutions for some of these factors, while others may require an expert to complete. Anyway – this article is assuming that you have implemented some sort of SEO effort, or you’ve paid an agency/freelancer to do so, and you’re wondering if it’s paying off. Well – has your website traffic from search engines increased?
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How to measure traffic from search engines
Cruxdata uses a combination of data from Google Search Console and Google analytics to provide you with an in-depth, easy to read dashboard that shows not only your website traffic from search engines, but also the performance of the different components of SEO.
Don’t forget – SEO is an on-going process that can definitely take time before you see any results. While it’s important to understand that everyone’s SEO process may be different, you must also be wary of agencies or freelancers that promise SEO results, specifically a search engine ranking. While you should be wary of grandiose promises, we recommend that a small business should consider an SEO agency or consultant.
