How to Tell if Your SEO Efforts Are Paying Off

Many companies nowadays are aware of the influence of search engines and know that SEO is something that can help send more customers their way, but with just a basic understanding of the concept it can be difficult to tell if their SEO efforts are really having the desired effect. SEO agencies send updates, but these are not always easy to understand for non-experts. Here are the essentials that you need to know to assess their work.

Indexed pages

An “indexed” page basically means one that is recognised by major search engines such as Google. If a page on your website is not indexed, it will not be able to show up in the search results.

Obviously, just being indexed does not tell you anything about where your pages will rank in the results, but if this number is much lower than you expect or not increasing as fast as it should be then it is a good indication that something is wrong.

Impressions and clicks

Two other easy numbers to wrap your head around are impressions and clicks. The former counts all the times that your web pages were returned as results for actual searches that people have performed.

Clicks take this a step further by measuring how many times people visited your website after it was returned as a result. Over time, you want to see both of these figures in an uptrend, and the number of clicks as a percentage of impressions should get larger too.

Average position

When you contact King Kong, a leading US SEO agency, one of the first things they will do with you is figure out what keywords to target. It is no use ranking highly in the results for searches that your target customers are not making.

Once you have some well-chosen keywords, the metric you will want to monitor is the average position for each keyword. If this figure is 1 for most of your keywords, that is great! It means that you are the top search result for them. If it is not, then over time you will want to see these numbers shrinking as it indicates that your SEO efforts are working.

Conclusion

The reports of any responsible agency should contain these figures. While there are more sophisticated measures which can provide valuable insights into your company’s SEO strategy, tracking the ones above over a long-term horizon is the best way to see the bigger picture of whether your efforts are paying off.