(upbeat music)
- Doing SEO without goals in mind
is like driving in a new area without a map.
You'll probably wander aimlessly
and just end up getting lost.
Hi, I'm Will Gordon, an internet marketer here at WebFX
and today we're going to be talking about SEO metrics
and how to measure them.
So to measure your SEO success,
you really need to break it down into two basic concepts.
First, you have to have smart goals and secondly,
you have to have the right tools to measure those goals.
Some common SEO metrics that you might be familiar
with are traffic, keyword rankings, bounce rate,
time on site, average session duration
and then even getting down to the bottom line macro goals
of lead forms, contact forms, request a quote form
or calls to your business.
All of these metrics have different meanings
to your business.
Something like bounce rate refers to a metric
of how many people come directly to your site
and leave your site immediately
without viewing another page.
Time on site is a metric where people come to your site
and that clock starts ticking
until their session on your website ends.
Leads are what they mean to your business.
So I mentioned earlier that you have to have SMART goals
with your SEO metrics.
SMART means specific, measurable, achievable,
realistic and timely.
Say, we wanna increase our organic traffic.
I'm already getting specific by saying organic traffic
and say, we want to increase it by 10% or maybe 25%.
That 10% might be achievable quarter over quarter
but that 25% metric might be better achieved
over a year-over-year comparison.
My biggest piece of advice for setting SMART goals
when it comes to your SEO campaign is to have an open
and honest conversation with your internet marketer.
We wanna make sure that we're on the same page to be sure
that we can set those specific, measurable,
achievable, realistic, and timely results.
So now that we've talked about SEO metrics
and how to set SMART goals around those metrics,
we wanna make sure that we're using the right tools
to measure our goals along the way.
There's a lot of analytics platforms out there.
One that I recommend personally,
it's free for everyone to use is Google Analytics.
There's some more out there that you can get
more in depth with, but they do typically come
with a monthly fee or a yearly fee associated with it.
Google Analytics will offer you most of what you need
day in and day out.
Here at WebFX, we have our proprietary software
called MarketingCloudFX.
It includes tools like LeadManagerFX, CallTrackerFX
and so much more.
Tools like LeadManagerFX help us tie together
the leads that you're getting on your website
to your bottom line and where those leads are coming from
and what marketing initiatives are causing the leads
to come to your website.
There's also other third-party tools that you can use
to measure certain specific goals within your SEO campaign.
These would be tools like Aatrix, SEMrush, RankWatch,
and there are so much more.
Now that you have your SEO metrics and SMART goals in place,
you're probably wondering how long it takes
to see SEO results for your business.
This can vary widely, but I'd like to it down
by a new business just starting out versus
an established business with an established online presence.
If you're a new business starting out,
it might take a few years to actually see a traction
and momentum and results as far as SEO goes.
If you're an established business
with an established website and maybe you've done
some SEO in the past, you might see results
in as soon as two, three months,
maybe upwards of the six to eight months mark.
When you're measuring your goals and your SEO results,
you wanna consider what type of business you are
to compare to what benchmark.
If you're a seasonal business,
it might not be the smartest thing to do
to compare your results month over month
or quarter over quarter.
It might be best to do that on a year-over-year basis
so you can see what the results were 365 days ago
for a fair comparison.
At WebFX, we have a lot of clients that we've worked
with that have unique SMART goals.
Our porting, we try to make it as custom as possible.
So we're focusing on the KPIs and how we're impacting
those KPIs and the smart goals throughout the SEO campaigns,
their PPC campaigns or whatever other services
they're working with us on.
Check out our SEO guide for marketing managers
or contact us to learn more about SEO for your business.