How to evaluate SEO

Using meaningful metrics to see how your SEO is performing

Any SEO strategy is only as good as the results that it delivers. It’s no good ticking all the boxes with your SEO only then to sit back thinking the job’s done. Your SEO has to prove itself in a real world environment, and that means results.

Those results aren’t just about where you appear in the search results, and how many hits your website achieves – as important as both of those are. It’s also about how it helps to increase leads, enquiries, sign-ups, and sales.

You also have to evaluate your SEO using a set of meaningful metrics to see how it’s performing.

What are your goals?

Before you evaluate your SEO, you need to identify what the goals are for your website. These should have formed a key part in the overall development of your strategy, but if they didn’t, it’s time to think about them.

Your goals should be specific and measurable, such as increasing the number of enquiries by 10 per cent or improving sales by a similar percentage. If your goals are not being met, you might like to take a deeper dive into how your SEO works. You can do this through a variety of different metrics.

SEO Foundational Metrics

Your organic rank and visibility can give you real insight into how your content is performing. You can do this by looking at several on-page, or off-page, metrics.

These include:

Keyword rankings: This is how and where your content appears on search engine results pages.
Traffic: How much traffic is being brought to your page by the content that’s hosted on it.
Backlinks: How many inbound links are pointed to your web pages.
Click-through rate: This is the percentage of people that have arrived at your page of content via a search result.

Website Engagement Metrics

It’s no use attracting people to your website if it doesn’t lead to greater engagement. You can have lots of hits, but very few of them might be meaningful.

Website engagement metrics look at how people navigate your website, how long they stay, and what they particularly find appealing. Website engagement metrics will look at the number of new visitors on your page and how they interact with your content. They will also look at how many conversions they encourage and crucially, how many are simply bouncing away before reading your content.

Patience is a virtue

When you’re measuring your SEO, it’s important to remember that it’s not a single one-off event, but an ongoing process. The aim is to improve the performance of your website progressively through your SEO strategy.

Regular relevant content is important, but so too is ensuring that the technical aspects of your SEO strategy are all in place to give it the right platform to shine. Whether you’re looking for a thorough assessment of your current SEO from a professional eye, or would like a complete SEO makeover, then Aqueous Digital can help.

Our SEO consultancy and full SEO services can transform your website’s SEO performance for the better.

Call us on 0800 285 1424 or email us at hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk for a free audit of your website and to have a chat about how we can support the success of your business with our award-winning search engine optimisation.

Find out more about the SEO services we offer.