How (And Why) to Measure Your SEO Success Quarterly

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CEO Approved Content

What SEO metrics should you check? It could take hours if you want. Learn what to do in this post.

How often do you check your search success? Every day? Weekly? Never?

With organic search, you don’t need to check frequently. In fact, you’ll drive yourself insane if you do!

Quarterly review is often enough. Plus, you need to know a few things to check beyond your rankings.

  1. Rankings Aren’t Your Only Measure of Success

Rank’s important – no doubt. But it shouldn’t be the only thing you check. What if you rank in the top 5 for 10 keywords, but haven’t seen any profit growth?

While you should check it, rank doesn’t mean everything.

  1. Check Your Overall Traffic

Compare your total traffic to the previous quarter and the same quarter last year. You should notice decent growth over last year with an active SEO campaign (20% or so). You should be about the same or slightly better (0-10%) than the previous quarter.

In Google Analytics, click “Acquisition,” “All Traffic”, and then “Channels.” Then, in the upper right, change your date range so it’s like this:

Change “Previous year” to “Previous period” to check quarter-over-quarter growth.

If you see a boost in your rankings, you should see the same in your traffic too.

  1. Peek at Your Referral Traffic

“Referral” traffic comes from other websites. You’ll notice plenty of websites here that you’ve never heard of.

Don’t worry about those. Every website gets its share of junk traffic.

You will want to pay attention to traffic from local business review sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Citysearch, and Google Maps.

  1. What’s Your Conversion Rate?

This is the most important goal of course! In Google Analytics, you can actually set up goals to track whatever you want as a conversion.

The best thing to do is to make your contact form’s “thank-you” page the conversion page. That way you know how many contacts you got.

If you don’t already track this, it’s easy to set up. Just go to “Admin” in Google Analytics’ top menu. Then press “Goals,” which is on the right.

You’ll see this (minus those helpful red circles):

You can set up “Goals” to track literally anything. If you’re a services-based business, you may want to set up goals to see how each service page converts.

Then, you can use the data later on to adjust the messaging on your services pages.

  1. What about Phone Calls?

This is the one aspect of SEO success that’s hard to track. How do you know how many people call you from your website, or because of a referral?

The answer’s simple: set up a phone number exclusively for your website. You can also use call tracking software to help with this.

That’s all you need to do to check your SEO success. When you have your system set up, it takes just a few minutes to review quarterly.

Joshua Cabe Johnson

Joshua Cabe Johnson

Joshua Cabe Johnson has been an SEO since 2008. He has personally helped over 1000 clients with online visibility and brand strategy for SEO growth.

Visual rankings has been helping small business owners online since 2002.

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