4 Ways to Tell if Your SEO is Working

Search engine optimization continues to be one of the most important and effective forms of marketing. But doing it well takes an investment of time or money. Unfortunately, many people who are proactive about doing SEO, don’t actually know what impact their SEO having.

How can you tell if SEO is working?

I’m glad you asked…

4 Ways to Tell if Your SEO is Working

1) Search ranking reports – It’s important to check your search rankings for the keywords you’re targeting on a regular basis and then evaluate how your website’s search rankings have changed over time. We send our clients monthly SEO reports so they can see month-to-month changes in search rankings. We also monitor our clients search rankings over the entire time we work together so we can see trends over several months and even years.

2) Website traffic data – Improving a website’s search rankings is great, but reason we want better search rankings is because we hope they’ll bring more visitors to the website. Therefore, it’s also important to regularly check the number of visitors a website is getting from search engines on a and compare that to previous months. A lot of websites experience seasonal fluctuations in traffic, so compare year over year changes in addition to month over month.

3) Website conversions – We’re not talking about spiritual conversions, but how many people who visit your website do what you’d like them to do. For e-commerce sites, a conversion is a sale. For some websites, a conversion might be when a visitor fills out a form requesting more information. For some websites a conversion might be subscribing to an email list.

It’s good to track a website’s total number of conversions each month. It’s even better, though, to track how many conversions come from each source (e.g. search engines, online ads, social media). There are 2 ways to get conversion source data. You could ask people to identify how they found you when they place their order or request more info. You can also setup conversion tracking in Google Analytics. Because neither one of these options is perfect, we recommend doing both.

4) Offline conversions – What are your organization’s 2017 goals? Unless your website is an ecommerce site, your goals probably take place offline. For churches, goals might include a new visitors, new members or baptisms. For schools, goals might include new students. For businesses, goals typically include sales and revenue.

If you want to know the bottom line of how well your SEO is working, you need to track how many of these people found you through search engines. That means you’ve got to ask new people how they found you, and you’ve got to write down and keep track of that data.

Even if you hire a Christian SEO or church SEO like OurChurch.Com, we can’t do this one for you. We will discuss and identify your offline goals with you, we’ll even create an online spreadsheet for you to track your goals, but you’ve still got to ask people how they found you and write it down.

If you’re not much of a numbers person, remember…

Numbers only matter because people count. -Dave Adamson

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What about you?

• Do you know what impact your SEO is having?
• When it comes to planning your budget and marketing strategy for next year, do you think it’d be helpful to know how many of your new visitors, students or client this year came from search engines?