Track and measure the ROI of an SEO campaign
Track and measure the ROI of an SEO campaign
1. Make sure you have both Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up for your website, and tracking is working correctly.
GSC will give you insight into the keywords your users search for, and GA will help you better understand user behaviors.
2. Run keyword research and set SEO goals for the next 12 months based on the difficulty of the keywords you are trying to target.
Make sure to have a mixture of informational, navigational, and transactional keywords that you are putting effort into optimizing for. For example: Information: What is CRO? Navigational: CXL CRO calculator Transactional: Best CRO courses.
3. Set a main goal by which you measure success. Traffic is the #1 goal for SEO and will typically be your main goal.
4. Set secondary goals that support and give more insight into your main goal.
For example: Conversions – leads or sales. Increased visibility in search results. Ranking for more non-branded keywords.
5. Use Google Analytics built-in annotations to leave notes about when assets were published and links updated. This will help you to analyze results.
Content Refreshes will take less time to see an impact, whereas new content should be evaluated more seriously 90 days after publishing to see how it’s performing.
6. Go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions in Google Analytics to track your organic traffic ROI.
For more complicated user journeys, use the assisted conversions report to see the effort SEO has on your conversions. This requires that you set up conversion goals first.
7. Use Google Search Console's built-in Compare function to see trends and patterns in groups of keywords over time.
8. Calculate your investment in the SEO campaign compared to the increase in traffic and sales conversions.
SEO takes time to see results. Especially if you don’t have a PR department or people aren’t actively searching your brand. Compare SEO to financial compound interest and look at it in terms of years, not months or weeks.