If you’ve been creating new content, working to get links back to your site, and taking other steps to improve your search engine optimization (SEO), you might be wondering when and how to measure any new SEO performance—and what to do with that information.
As an agency owner and SEO pro, I help my clients figure this out and develop SEO strategies that really work for their businesses. I want to share a few of my top tips and tools with you so that you can begin to get a better understanding of what is—and is not—working for your website when it comes to SEO.
Table of contents
Getting started
In order to measure SEO performance, you’ll need to take a look at a few different factors, including:
- Website placement in search engine results
- Total traffic volume
- Consistency of traffic volume
- Quantity and type of backlinks
As you get started with the measurement steps we’ll discuss in this article, remember that SEO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. While there are best practices to follow, there’s no singular SEO solution that works equally well for everyone.
Instead, SEO is a system that involves developing a hypothesis, implementing it, and testing the results. What works best for another business may not be what works best for you.
SEO also changes a lot. Google tweaks the way its algorithm works, and website browsers stop supporting certain features over time. This is why continual evaluation of SEO performance is important. What worked six months ago might not work six months from now.
However, you can generally rely on the following SEO best practices, terms, and tools to guide you.
Essential SEO best practices
To set yourself up for the best possible SEO results, remember these best practices when optimizing your site:
- Create and publish website content: This is how Google and other search engines know what your site is about, and when they should show your site in search results.
- Keep your content original: Publishing the same content across multiple websites (even if you own all of the sites) can hurt, not help, your SEO performance.
- Prioritize the user experience: If your website looks cool, but is difficult to use (think images that are slow to load, flashing banners, or hard-to-read-text), it can negatively impact SEO performance.
- Focus on mobile usability: Google puts a big premium on how well websites perform on mobile phones and tablets.
- Use Google services available to you: Creating a Google Business Profile is yet another way to get your website to appear in search results. Plus, it’s generally a good idea to give Google as much information as it can about your business and your website. If your business could use and benefit from other Google services, such as a company YouTube page, create those as well.
Important SEO terms to know
You’ll likely encounter the following terms when working on optimization efforts or monitoring SEO performance:
- SERP is short for search engine results page and refers to the lists of results returned by Google when you type in a keyword
- Keywords are words and phrases that people type into search engines to find information
- Keyword ranking is the order in which your website appears in SERPs (such as first result, fifth result, etc.)
- Keyword volume refers to the number of people who search for a given word or phrase over a period of time (often a month)
- Keyword difficulty is how difficult it will be to rank for the phrase, and is increased when lots of other websites are competing to appear in the same SERPs
- Website traffic refers to the searchers and other visitors who come to your website after clicking on a link or typing your URL in their web browser
- Featured snippets are sections of content highlighted by Google and shown at the top of SERPs
- Domain authority is a numerical score, often estimated by SEO tools like Moz or SEMrush, that predicts how valuable a website is and how likely it is to rank highly in search results
- Ranking factors are the various elements that Google considers when deciding how your site should rank, and can include content quality, website speed, mobile usability, and backlinks among other factors
Useful tools for measuring SEO performance
Finally, when measuring SEO performance, you’ll typically need to use a few different tools like:
- Google Analytics, a free tool that shows you information about the type, frequency, and actions of visitors to your website.
- Google Search Console, another free tool that provides insights about how your site appears in SERPs.
- An SEO tool that allows you to conduct keyword research and evaluate how both your site and competitors’ sites are performing in SERPs. These are often geared toward agencies and SEO professionals, but anyone can technically sign up for them if their budget allows.
- Spreadsheets, whether Google Sheets or Excel. It’s useful to use a spreadsheet to keep track of your keyword research and other metrics (and you can often export data from the above tools into spreadsheet format).
How to measure SEO success
When you’re getting ready to start measuring and tracking your SEO performance, you’ll want to do the following six steps:
- Set realistic SEO goals
- Keep track of your target keywords
- Use campaign tags
- Check these 10 SEO metrics in Google Analytics
- Monitor trends in Google Search Console
- Test your site with Google PageSpeed Insights
Step 1: Set your SEO goals
Tracking and improving SEO performance starts with setting goals. In addition to knowing what you’ll be measuring, you’ll want to have something to work toward.
Good SEO goals are:
- Realistic It can take months, not weeks or days, to achieve the results you want when optimizing your website. Give yourself an appropriate amount of time to achieve your goal—at least six months. If you have a new website, it may take even longer to begin ranking for specific keywords.
- Quantitative You should be able to measure your results in numbers.
- Specific Saying your goal is just to “improve” your site is vague. You’ll have better results if you can very specifically state what you’d like to achieve, such as “25% more visitors from organic search in the next 6 months.”
While your individual SEO goals may vary, the ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to appear higher in SERPs—ideally on the first page—and get more website visitors as a result.
Step 2: Keep track of your target keywords
Because improving your SEO performance is all about ranking at a higher level for more keywords, you’ll want to identify and monitor these target keywords from the very beginning.
You can use an SEO tool to identify keywords that have a good search volume and reasonable difficulty level. (I personally like to use Ella Interactive with my clients.) Many tools also allow you to track and monitor your website’s performance in SERPs for each of these keywords as well.
If you don’t have access to an SEO tool, you can manually track your performance the quick and dirty way:
- Open Google in a private browser tab
- Type in the keyword
- See where your website falls in the SERPs
- Log this number (4th result, 10th result, 25th result, etc.) in a spreadsheet
- See where your top competitors fall in the SERP for the same keyword and record that data in a spreadsheet as well
You’ll want to repeat these steps every month. Be sure to note how your website ranks, too—is it in the normal SERP list of results? Does it appear thanks to your Google Business Profile? Are you part of a featured snippet? Do your images appear at the top of search engine results? All of these are valid ways to rank for a keyword.
Step 3: Use campaign tags
Campaign tags are useful as they can help you see what sources your website visitors are coming from.
You’ll need to use a tool like the Google campaign URL builder to generate links with unique tracking codes. You’ll then place these tags in different places around the web, such as on your social media profile pages or in emails.
When you use tagged links, it’s easier to differentiate organic traffic from traffic generated by social media campaigns, marketing emails, paid ads and more.
There’s a lot of variables that go into how web traffic is monitored, though, getting help from an SEO expert is recommended if you aren’t familiar with URL tagging.
Step 4: Check these 10 SEO metrics in Google Analytics
Once you have established your goals to track, and tagged any necessary URLs, you can begin to monitor website data in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics contains a massive wealth of information, but you don’t need to concern yourself with it all at once. If you’re just starting to use Analytics yourself, familiarize yourself with these metrics first:
Step 5: Monitor trends in Google Search Console
When Google Analytics starts to show organic search traffic coming into your site, you can take a closer look in Google Search Console. Search Console will show you the following:
- What keywords people are searching for when they find your site
- How many times you’ve appeared in search for a given keyword (impressions) vs. the number of actual clicks generated (click through rate, or CTR)
- Whether or not the pages on your site are able to be crawled and indexed by Google
You can view a lot of this data in both a list view and a graph view. When looking at your graphs in Google Search Console, you’ll want to see a fairly consistent and steady upward trend over time—not sporadic high spikes and low dips.
Check out this Google Search Console chart of impressions as an example. You can see a steady upward trend over time. A major site update, indicated by the arrow, caused impressions to dip while Google indexed the new content—but they’re climbing back up again.
By regularly checking Google Search Console, you can begin to identify any patterns in the way people are finding you through search. If these patterns align with your goals, great—you’re on track. If what you’re seeing is a surprise, though, you may need to readjust your strategy.
Step 6: Test your site with Google PageSpeed Insights
When working to track your SEO performance, it’s also important to keep an eye on how your page performs in terms of speed and user experience.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that shows you how quickly your website loads, how fast visitors can begin to interact with it, and how it performs on mobile devices vs. desktop or laptop computers.
When you run a PageSpeed Insights report, you can learn about the following metrics. By keeping track of any changes to these metrics (together called core web vitals) you can make sure that any changes you make to your site actually help, not hurt, SEO performance.
PageSpeed Insights uses a simple color coding system. Green means you’re performing well, yellow means there’s room for improvements, and red means you’ve got some problems to address.
Using your findings to improve SEO performance
You’ll need to track all of the above for several months in order to begin making decisions about how to adjust your SEO efforts. Once you obtain some data about how your site is performing in search, you can begin to evaluate whether or not you need to make changes to your strategy.
The table below offers just a few examples of what you might discover, and what it means. Ultimately, there are a lot of different factors that can play into how well your site performs in search results, and steps to take to improve SEO.
While you can DIY the SEO performance monitoring and improvement process, working with an SEO professional will help you find the right results faster. While hiring an SEO expert comes with an initial cost, their expertise often saves you time and money in the long run.
Why work with an SEO expert?
Additional benefits of working with an SEO professional include:
- They have the SEO tools to uncover all of the data you need and the know-how to interpret it. You don’t have to buy expensive licenses for software you’ll only use once or twice.
- They can help you eliminate the trial-and-error that comes with DIY SEO. This gets you results faster.
- They can run technical SEO audits and content audits on your site to make sure it’s ready to be optimized, and establish a baseline or benchmark from which you’ll be starting.
- They can provide assistance in building a healthy, high-quality backlink profile (the practice of "link building") that makes your site look great to Google and other search engines.
Through my digital marketing agency, Web Rocket Media, I help businesses improve their SEO performance every day. If you’d like some help building SEO campaigns and improving your site’s visibility in search engine results, send an inquiry through my Upwork profile and we can discuss the best options for your website.
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