How to Determine if Your SEO Campaign is Working

Most marketers measure SEO performance by focusing on organic traffic numbers and keyword rankings. Those items are important but don’t provide the full picture. There are actually several other metrics that can be used to understand your SEO campaigns. We’ll cover them here and help you to better determine how your law firm’s SEO campaign is doing. 

Is Your SEO Campaign Working? 

1. Organic traffic – This number reflects the number of visits that come to your site from search engines without clicking on ads. It’s generally a good indicator of how well your web pages rank for relevant keywords and the quality of traffic that you get. You can view this information by going to the Google Search Console and looking under the “Search Results” report which is under “Performance”. From there, benchmark your own site against a few competitors. This is honestly one of the best and easiest ways to see what is working and what’s not. 
2. Keyword rankings – Your website’s position on a search engine results page (SERP) for a specific keyword or phrase is also important. The higher you rank, the more traffic you are likely driving. That being said, a website’s keyword ranking can change for a variety of reasons, whether it’s an algorithm update or losing backlinks or another factor. If you set up an official campaign, it’ll track your rankings daily and automatically. You can find this information in the “Position Tracking” tool. Enter your domain and click “Set up tracking”. You’ll also have to pick a search engine, device, location, and language in order to track rankings. 
3. SERP visibility – How often and how prominently your website appears on the search engine results pages for relevant keywords is called SERP visibility. It takes keyword ranking into account as well as SERP features like snippets, image packs, and other organic results. You can also find this in the “Position Tracking” tool mentioned above. The percentage that you’ll see is based on click-through rate and shows your site’s progress in Google’s top 100 results for the keywords tracked in your campaign.  
4. Click-through rate – CTR is the percentage of users who click on your website from the SERP. It shows how successful your title tags and meta descriptions are in attracting searcher’s attention or interest. It’s calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of overall impressions, then multiplying that number by 100. As an example, if your site appeared on a SERP 100 times in one week and 10 people clicked on the link, your CTR is 10%. 
5. Bounce rate – The percentage of users who visit your site but leave without further action is your bounce rate. It would include things like going to another page without filling out an included form. It’s a good indicator of how engaging and relevant visitors find your content. Monitoring bounce rate will help you find any weaknesses in your SEO strategy. For more tips on how to reduce bounce rate, make sure to read our past post. 
6. Website authority over time – This SEO metric predicts how well your website will rank on search engines. The SEO platform SEMrush calls this metric “Authority Score” and it’s based on the quality and quantity of your site’s backlinks, organic search traffic, and other data. The score is presented on a scale from 1 – 100. If you are an SEMrush client, you can use their analytics to find this data. 
7. Backlinks – These are links from other sites that point to your own. They are actually one of the most critical factors showing Google that your site is trustworthy and valuable to others. It’s very important to track and monitor your backlinks. This is another area where you can dig deeper depending on the tools that you use. For example, SEMrush has a tool where you can see trend graphs for your backlinks over time. 
8. Page speed – How fast your web pages load on different devices and browsers makes a big difference to user experience. Recall that Google’s ranking algorithm rewards sites that offer a good page experience. For SEO success, it’s key to monitor page speed and do what you can to improve it. 
9. Engagement time – The average amount of time that users spend on a page is helpful for understanding how well your content matches searcher intent. When a searcher types in a keyword, lands on some content, and then stays there to read, it signals to search engines that a site satisfied their inquiry. This is the signal that you want to send to search engines, so understanding engagement metrics for your web pages is particularly important. 

Related: SEO Basics in an Hour

Takeaway: 

Remember that an effective SEO strategy is a marathon, not a sprint. SEO campaigns should be treated as ongoing efforts that will never really be “complete”. To understand the progress you’re making over time, and where to make improvements, refine your strategies using the data from these metrics. Make sure to review these numbers periodically and then apply the insights to optimizing your content for better SEO results. If you need more support in starting your SEO journey, try our Digital Marketing for Law Firms course. Students who graduate the course will walk away knowing how to implement high-performing integrated marketing plans that address their firm’s goals and deliver on key metrics like the ones mentioned above.