Is your website stuck deep in Google’s search results, even though you’ve put a lot of time and money into SEO? You’re not alone—many people face this frustrating issue.
SEO is both an art and a science, and it’s crucial for any modern business. It boosts your brand’s credibility, attracts more organic visitors, and ultimately increases revenue.
But what if it feels like your investment isn’t paying off? In this blog, we’ll help you assess your current SEO efforts and figure out if you need to make any changes.
Setting Realistic Expectations
When reviewing your SEO efforts, it’s important to set realistic goals. Remember, SEO is a long-term game that requires ongoing effort; it’s not a quick fix. Give your strategy some time to work and show results before jumping to conclusions.
There are many factors that can affect your results. A drop in traffic for a month doesn’t mean everything’s going wrong. Look at your performance over a longer period to get a clearer picture. A successful SEO campaign relies on patience, testing, and making regular improvements based on data.
How long does it take for SEO to work?
SEO is a long-term investment that typically starts showing results in three to six months, with more significant improvements often seen after a year. The exact time frame can vary depending on your website’s size, industry, competition, and other factors. Since SEO is more of a marathon than a sprint, it’s important to stay persistent and patient.
Can you predict SEO results?
Predicting SEO results can be tricky because of factors like industry trends, algorithm changes, and competition. Even experienced SEO pros can only make educated guesses based on data and patterns, and there’s no way to be completely certain. It’s important to set realistic expectations to truly understand if your SEO efforts are paying off.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Monitor
The metrics you should track depend on what you want to achieve with your SEO campaign. For example, strategies for building brand awareness and generating leads might differ. So, the important KPIs will vary based on your goals.
If one KPI isn’t performing well, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just one part of the bigger picture of how your campaign is doing.
Here are eight KPIs that can help you evaluate your SEO efforts.
Organic Traffic
The main goal of SEO is to boost your site’s ranking in search engines, so tracking organic traffic is key. If you see a steady increase in organic traffic, it means your SEO efforts are working and getting your site more visibility. To see if you’re making progress, look at a period of 3 to 12 months and compare it to the previous year.
Conversions
Conversions are specific actions that visitors take on your site, like filling out a form or making a purchase. One of SEO’s main goals is to boost these conversions. As your SEO efforts attract more targeted traffic, you should see more conversions. To track this, look at various time periods to see if the number of conversions is going up or down, just like you would with organic traffic.
Keyword Rankings
This KPI tracks how many keywords your website ranks for and what your average position is for those keywords. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Search Console can help you see if your site is improving or declining in search results, reflecting your SEO efforts. Check how long you’ve been working with your SEO provider and stay updated on current trends to see what’s working best.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) measures how strong your website is and how likely it is to rank higher than competitors. By tracking whether your DA is going up or down, you can get a sense of your site’s overall SEO health. Use tools like Moz’s Domain Authority Checker to see how your DA has changed over time. Has it improved, stayed the same, or gone down?
Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your site. They’re crucial for your rankings and domain authority, so high-quality backlinks are really important. Use tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush to check your backlink profile. See if the number of domains linking to you has gone up or down, and check the quality of those domains. Your main goal should be to get strong backlinks from well-regarded sites in your industry.
Engagement Metrics
These KPIs measure how users interact with your site, like how long they stay on a page and how engaged they are. Good SEO should make your site more appealing, encouraging visitors to stay longer and eventually convert. Use Google Analytics to check the performance of your top content. Look at how engagement metrics are trending over several months to see if they’re improving.
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Brand Mentions
Using tools like Moz’s Brand Authority or Google Alerts to track brand mentions can help you keep an eye on how your brand’s online presence is growing or shrinking. More brand mentions can boost your online visibility, even though they’re not directly tied to SEO.
Traffic Value
Ahrefs’ “traffic value” metric estimates how much your organic traffic is worth. Watching whether this value goes up or down can give you useful insights into how well your SEO strategy is performing.
Leads and Sales
The main goals of SEO are to boost sales and generate more leads, like phone calls, form submissions, and emails. To see if your SEO efforts are paying off, you need to track these results closely. However, tracking sales figures can be tricky without your input as a business partner. It’s important to share how many of the leads turn into actual sales. To figure out if leads and sales are increasing, compare your internal sales data with your website’s performance.
Organic Revenue
For e-commerce sites, tracking organic revenue is really important. This KPI shows how much money you’re making from organic search traffic and helps you see if your SEO efforts are paying off. Check Google Analytics to see if your revenue has gone up over the past three, six, or twelve months.
But remember, it’s important to put the data in context. Are your KPIs measuring accurately, or has conversion tracking stopped working? If your business is seasonal, it might be hard to compare peak and off-peak times. Also, consider if factors like a global pandemic, recession, or supply chain issues have affected your business. Without this context, you might not get the full picture of how well your SEO is performing.
Tools for Tracking SEO Performance
Here are some tools you can use to check every part of your SEO efforts, from free options to premium ones:
- Google Analytics: This free tool gives you detailed insights into your website’s traffic. You can track user behavior, conversions, and a bunch of other performance metrics.
- Google Search Console: Another free tool from Google, it shows how your site is doing in Google Search. You can see things like visibility, indexing status, and any issues affecting your ranking.
- Ahrefs: A paid tool that’s great for backlink research. It offers deep insights into your site’s organic traffic, keyword rankings, and competitor analysis.
- SEMrush: A powerful premium tool that provides a lot of information on keywords, competitors, and your overall SEO health. It also helps you track both paid and organic search performance.
- Moz Link Explorer: Part of Moz’s SEO toolkit, this tool helps you analyze your domain authority and backlink profile, which is useful for planning your link-building strategy.
5 Signs Your SEO Strategy isn’t Working
Not every SEO tactic works as planned. While KPIs are important to track, there are five clear signs that your SEO strategy might not be doing its job.
Organic Traffic Drops
Traffic drops can happen suddenly or gradually, and neither is good news for your website, though for different reasons.
Sudden Drops: These can occur if Google updates its algorithm or if your site is hit with a manual penalty. Such drops are rare unless there’s an issue with your analytics setup or something has gone wrong with Google itself. If you see an unexpected drop in traffic, ask your SEO team for an explanation. You can also check Google Search Console to see if your site has been hit with a manual action. If that’s the case, you might want to reconsider working with any black hat SEO agencies.
Gradual Drops: These usually point to problems with your SEO strategy. A slight decline over a few months might be one thing, but a steady drop over several months or years is a bigger issue. While seasonal trends or events like COVID-19 could be factors, if you expected growth over time and aren’t seeing it, it might be time to rethink your approach.
Content Is Falling Flat
If your content isn’t getting any attention, it might mean there’s an issue with your strategy or the quality of your material. Even if you and your SEO team think it’s great, if it’s not driving traffic or showing up in search results, something’s wrong. Content can be unpredictable and take time to gain traction, but you should still see some results to make sure your efforts are paying off. If you’re posting blogs every month and still not seeing traffic after six months to a year, it’s a sign that your content strategy might need a serious overhaul.
Conversions Are Going Down
If you’re seeing fewer conversions and there aren’t any external reasons for it, your SEO might be off track. There’s likely a gap somewhere in the process. Whether it’s the way you’re drawing in the right customers with keywords, the content on your page, the layout and design, or even the conversion actions like filling out a contact form—something isn’t working. An experienced SEO expert can help figure out where the problem is and suggest ways to fix it.
Poor-Quality Backlinks
If your website has too many spammy backlinks, Google might penalize you. While you can’t always control who links to your site, you can avoid linking with shady sources. Common sources of bad backlinks include irrelevant websites, dubious directories, link farms, and overly optimized anchor text.
Having high-quality backlinks from trustworthy sites is key to good SEO. If you notice spammy links showing up and your SEO team isn’t actively building your backlink profile, it might be a problem. If your SEO team is using private blog networks (PBNs) or buying links, that’s a serious issue.
Keyword Rankings are Dropping
If you notice that your target keywords are slipping in the rankings over time, it’s a clear sign that your SEO isn’t working. The main goal of SEO is to rank higher in Google search results so more people click on your site. If your average position keeps dropping, it likely means your on-page optimization isn’t doing its job and your content isn’t performing well. A drop in your average position often shows that your content needs better optimization and you’re falling behind newer competitors.
Good vs Bad SEO
Good SEO focuses on creating a plan that’s tailored to help a company achieve its goals. It’s not just about choosing the right actions; it’s also about having the technical skills and experience to carry them out effectively. Getting the strategy and tactics right is crucial.
Effective SEO uses “White Hat” methods, which means it prioritizes improving the user experience over trying to trick search engines. A strong SEO plan knows whether to focus on technical changes, link building, content creation, or on-site improvements.
On the other hand, bad SEO results from poor planning, sloppy execution, or both. This might include targeting the wrong keywords, missing technical issues, misplacing priorities, or using “Black Hat” tactics that violate search engine rules.
Inadequate execution means not paying enough attention to quality, timing, or details, which can lead to poor results. Unlike good SEO, which is thorough, sustainable, and user-focused, bad SEO usually fails to enhance or may even harm a website’s visibility and performance.
How To Tell If Your SEO Provider Is Working
KPIs, resources, and warning signs give you a look at how your SEO is performing. But if you’re not familiar with website analytics, it can be easy to misinterpret them. So, when you’re reviewing your SEO, it’s important to ask your provider about any concerns and see how they respond.
Here are some key questions to ask your SEO company:
- What keywords are we targeting, and how have their rankings changed?
- How has our organic traffic changed over the past three, six, or twelve months?
- What’s our conversion rate from organic traffic?
- How has the number of conversions grown in the last three, six, or twelve months?
- Are we getting new, high-quality backlinks? Can you give examples?
- What technical issues were the most urgent, and have they been fixed in the past ninety days?
- How well is the content we’ve created in the last six months performing?
- How do you think our company is doing with organic search traffic?
- What are the future plans or strategies to improve our SEO performance?
- Can you show us the return on investment for our SEO efforts?
Asking these kinds of questions will keep your SEO provider on their toes. It’s a good sign if they’re surprised by such detailed questions—it means you’re holding them accountable. A great SEO company will be open and honest about both the successes and the challenges.
Making The Decision – When To Look Elsewhere
If you’ve given your SEO plan enough time to work and you’re still not seeing improvements in your KPIs, it might be time to consider a change.
Another big red flag is poor communication. You need to be able to rely on your SEO partner to keep you in the loop. They should be open about the strategies they’re using, how your campaign is performing, and any issues that come up. If your current provider isn’t sharing this information with you or if their reports are confusing and unclear, that’s a problem.
In the end, you want a partner who is committed to delivering real results, understands your industry, and communicates with you clearly and consistently.
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