How to Measure SEO Success – The Key Metrics That Matter

Measuring the success of your SEO campaign can be a tricky business. It doesn’t matter how you look at it, Google has dramatically changed the way that it sorts and ranks content ever since the Penguin algorithm update from 2012. 

In the early days of Google, the search engine giant would rely solely on text, on-page content, and the number of links pointing to a website in order to establish a ranking for particular keywords. Since then, Google has continued to evolve and change the way that it reads and understands the content on a page in order to assign value and rankings. Whereas 15 years ago the website with the most number of links was inherently ranked the highest, today, websites with a large number of low-quality links are often penalised or at least rank much lower than those who have backlinks coming from high-quality websites.

The one thing that has remained consistent throughout all of Googles algorithm changes has been their core desire to deliver a better experience for the user. By becoming more sophisticated in the way that they rank and show content to people, they have continued to improve the quality of results being shown to the user.

Despite the many changes that have happened over the last decade with the Google Search ranking algorithm, the way that search marketing professionals measure success has not changed all that much. One popular Hobart SEO consultant recently shared the way that they measure the success of an SEO campaign and the most important metrics that they track.

  • Organic website visitors
  • Traffic bounce rate
  • Overall website traffic versus organic sessions
  • Distribution of traffic amongst landing pages
  • Conversion rate
  • Time spent on page
  • Return user rate

It would be fair to say that these metrics and not terribly different from those that search engine optimisation professionals were using to measure the success of a campaign in the pre-penguin era. The way that they achieve this success and the methods that they use has changed dramatically, however, the metrics to measure that success has not changed.

There is an enormous number of variables that must be taken into consideration with each individual SEO campaign in order to track progress and growth. Understanding the intricacies of each campaign and what you can change in order to get the best results is one of the most difficult aspects for any such marketing professional.

The most successful SEO professionals are those that can anticipate changes to the search engine algorithm before they come. Given that Google changes the way that they rank and show content to users more than 600 times per year, An SEO practitioner should always be ready for change and know how to implement strategies at the drop of a hat.

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