Before any SEO project begins, determining your business goals is one of the most important things you can do. For example, your goal is to increase non-branded search traffic by 25%. Once you have identified your business goals, you can start thinking about what you must do to achieve those goals and the qualities that your SEO team must have.
However, as punk said before in the SEMWatch industry report series "Difficult Transformation-A Look at the Current Situation of China's SEO Industry III".
“Many companies doing business on the Internet are aware of the importance of SEO, but their pursuit of SEO is low investment, short time, and high returns. When many companies seek SEO outsourcing, they also propose to do it in a short time. Some keywords reach the top three positions.”
So what exactly should be the indicators for evaluating SEO results?
Ranking report?
Typically, clients will list a specific keyword they want to achieve a certain ranking for. There are many products on the market today that can help you set up and monitor rankings. However, it is best not to focus on this approach to effectiveness evaluation.
Especially when you target high search volume keywords, they actually only account for about ten percent of the total search volume. Even if you succeed in achieving your goal of ranking high for a given keyword, achieving your business growth goals is still unlikely unless you also implement a long-term supporting development strategy. In addition, ranking data fluctuates for many reasons, including what search engine servers serve your search results and so on.
Check rankings, but don’t let it be the deciding factor in your SEO success or failure.
How many new links are added?
Many times, potential clients will ask how many new links can be added to them each month. But it really depends on how many links they need.
If a client needs 1,000 links per month, this goal can be easily achieved through cheap outsourcing services. However, these links have little value. In this case, understand that sometimes one link is worth more than 100,000 times more than other links.
Tracking new links can be a lot of fun, if you have a measure of link quality. So go ahead and use this as a criterion for evaluating your link building campaign, not as a defining metric of success.
Non-branded search traffic
This is a critical evaluation indicator. Keep an eye on day-to-day traffic and long-term chart changes.
Brand search traffic is also a very important factor, because a small number of websites need SEO to help them improve their brand rankings. This is because the most common form of anchor text linked to the homepage of a website is the name of the organization.
However, you may find all kinds of irrelevant traffic and worthless traffic to your website, which will not help your website achieve more conversions. Don't forget to treat them differently.
visitor engagement
Visitor engagement includes bounce rate, time on site, and number of views per visitor, which are all useful tracking metrics. It's obvious that visitor engagement should be included in various comprehensive measures of SEO success or failure.
A higher-than-average bounce rate or a drop in the amount of time each visitor spends on your site might mean you start getting less relevant traffic. This also means that there is something wrong with your website itself.
Convert
This is the most important indicator in effectiveness evaluation. Everyone wants to see traffic converted into business.
For many companies, the most basic metric is sales of a product. However, conversions can also include "contact us" requests, completed registration forms, white paper or widget downloads, visitors to a specific page, and other types of goals.
When traffic and visitor engagement become indicators for evaluating the success of SEO projects, it is even more necessary to evaluate the conversions brought by natural search. If traffic increases by 50% and conversion rate increases by 30%, then your business increase should be 30%. It goes without saying that conversion is the most important. It is important to note that differences of the type just illustrated do not necessarily indicate a problem and are quite common.
Summarize
All the indicators listed here are useful regardless. But the last three are the most suitable for evaluating SEO projects. You can take multiple indicators into account, just be careful about how you use them—and don't let them mislead you. Ultimately you know what you need to measure is a combination of brand traffic, visitor engagement, and conversion rates.