Whether you are working on your SEO, or you have hired someone to do the work for you, measuring SEO performance is crucial to know if you are going in the right direction, and be sure your precious time and money are not wasted. So if you want to learn how to measure SEO performance you are in the right place!
Tools you will need to measure SEO results
To measure SEO performance you need to have the right tools set up, or ask your agency to provide you with reports extracted from these tools. If you hired someone to run your SEO campaign, that someone has to install at least two of these tools on your website, so that person needs to be able to provide you with the reports.
The tools you will need are:
Other tools you can use are “href”, “ubbersugest” and “MOZ”.
Using SEMrush to measure your SEO performance
First, you need to create a free account on SEMrush. Once you have done it, you will see the dashboard. Then, you need to go to the domain and click on domain overview. On domain overview type in your domain(website URL). In the example, we have used the website “Melbourneshred.com.au”. After introducing your URL click on Search.
The report gives you three KPIs to measure your SEO success:
- Authority Score: The Authority score is a value from 0 to 100 that represents how much search engines trust your website. Other websites show this as DA (Domain Authority) or DR (Domain Rating)
- Organic Search Traffic: This is an estimate of how many people will visit your website during the next 30 days. (organic traffic only takes into account search engine traffic).
- Backlinks: Number of backlinks from other websites to your website.
So, how to use this report? Just take a screenshot of this report and save it. wait one month and run it again to evaluate your progress.
For example, if you are running a link-building campaign or you paid for a link-building campaign you want to see the Backlinks number to increase. You also want to see your Authority Score increase. One common mistake in link building is trying to gain all sorts of backlinks.
If your SEO campaign is working you should see your organic traffic increasing in the report. Great SEO performance comes with good steady traffic.
How to measure your SEO performance if you just started working on it.
So you just started working on your SEO or maybe you just hired an agency or an SEO consultant and they said is too early to see results. While is true you need to wait to see your traffic grow, good SEOs know that continue measurement is the key to success. So even just after a month you should be able to measure SEO performance. The good news is that you can do it using Google Search console and SEMrush dashboard. So lets start!
To be able to see this report you need to have Google Search console set up on your website, once you have done it you can just log in and click on performance.
The performance report shows a simple but powerful report that shows how your website is behaving on Google. lets see the KPIs.
- Total clicks: easy to understand, # of clicks your website has received from google search engine.
- Total impressions: This is the first number you want to see increase when someone is working on your SEO. This number represents how many times google has shown your website on its results. So, even in the early days of your SEO campaign you want to see this number increasing. Why? because if they are doing their work the number of impressions has to increase. To see the results just click on date and the choose compare. Then choose a date range to compare and click on Apply.
- In the example you can see the website has had 1.000 more impressions and therefore 10 clicks more than the previous 7 days. as you can see the more impressions you have the more clicks or traffic to your website you are going to attract. Therefore total impressions is a Key KPI to measure SEO performance in early days.
- Average CTR: average CTR means click through rate. In other words the percentage of people that click on your impressions. total clicks / total impressions. Increasing your CTR alone means you increase your traffic, but this may take a while to see.
- Average position: It is the average position of your website in all the searches. The lower the best. As you can see on the example the page has gained 4 positions over the last week.
Measure your SEO success using Google Analytics
Another way to measure your SEO campaign execution is by analyzing the information of google Analytics. To be able to do it you need access to your google analytics account or its reports. lets start checking how to verify SEO results.
Google Analytics is a free tool that has great information about your website. In the example, we are using the Google Analytics to measure your SEO success.
To start go to your Analytics dashboard and click on acquisition, and then Search Console. Once you are on search console, go to Queries.
The Queries section shows how your website is ranking on Google for each query. If you have hired someone to help you with SEO or if you are working on it, you may have heard about the famous keywords. Well this reports shows you the Keywords in the column Search Query and Google rank on the column Average Position.
So, to measure you SEO campaign just:
- click on the Date range.
- select the period you want to analyze.
- click on compare check.
- choose the second period of time.
- Click on Apply
Summary
You can measure your SEO performance at any stage of your SEO campaign. To do it you need to use tools such Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The main indicators that your SEO campaign is working are:
- Increase in number of impressions(Google Search)
- Decrease in Average position for the Key Words that matter to you.(Google Analytics, search console view)
- Increase in organic traffic (Google Analytics)
- Increase in CTR( Google Search)
Hopefully this article has helped you to learn how to measure your SEO, if you like it, please follow us on Facebook.
Finally if you want professional assistant with your SEO, rank my web has a variety of packages and SEO services to help you to increase your organic traffic, and a variety of services to help you increase your sales.