One of my favourite parts of my client work is measuring the keyword progress every month. This allows us to see which keywords are getting traction and which ones are not. We can then make some strategic decisions around SEO campaigns in the future.

In this podcast episode, I review what specific metrics you can use to track your own progress in SEO. This can actually be used with any marketing you are wanting to build more awareness around.

I’ll be reviewing:

• Why I think tracking your data is important

• Specific metrics to use

• What tools can help you track these metrics.

Let’s dive in!

Listen to this podcast episode here:

Why is this even really important?

You might be wondering if this is even relevant to your business. You’ve probably heard before that what gets measured, gets improved. This same strategy applies to your marketing and SEO efforts.

Understanding the results you get from SEO can motivate you to take more action on your website. When you can see that specific pages on your site are already converting and getting you sales, it can generate excitement to improve those pages.

It can also help you get more intentional about your SEO strategy overall and making sure you are spending time/energy/money on the areas of your marketing and website that are going to get you the most results in the short term.

Choosing metrics that mean something to you

Here are some suggested metrics you can use to understand your results from SEO:

Business Metrics

• Conversion per Landing Page - understanding specific which landing pages (first page of visit) are leading to opt-in download and sales.

• Return on Investment per keyword - you can’t see this in Google Analytics but there is another tool (more info below) that allows you to tie conversion back to specific keywords

SEO Metrics

• Clicks

• Impressions (how many times is a specific keyword showing up in the results

• Position (what position are you in the search results. Eg. Page 1 or Page 50)

Intuitive Metrics

• Excitement factor: How excited are you to write about these specific keywords? How does the keyword feel like within your body?

• Repeated Questions: What questions do your clients ask you over again and again when it comes to your work?

• Objections/Your Process: What topics can you write about that answer common objections? What part of your process would you like someone to know about before hiring you?

Tools

The last thing we are going to cover is specific tools you can use to actually track these metrics.

Google Analytics

Here you can use the Behavior > Site Content > Landings Page to review your top landing pages and their conversion potential.

Google Analytics is overall a very powerful tool for understanding your SEO and website effectiveness.

Keyword Hero 

This allows you to setup a custom report that gives you specific keywords and their conversion potential. There is a free version of this tool you can use.

Search Console

Here you can take a closer look at your Search Data to identify how your site is showing up in the search results and also what keywords you can target more intentionally.

Pen/Paper 

If you are trying to touch base with yourself and understand which keywords are really going to align with your creativity and business, journaling out your thoughts can be very helpful. You can also brainstorm an initial outline to try out what it would feel like to write about the keyword.

Asana 

This is a great tool to start to pool all your content ideas and keep track of things you’ve already written. I use it to collect ideas I get on the fly and also give myself some structure (with deadlines) of content I want to share with my audience.

That’s it! Let me know what questions you have about measuring results for your SEO efforts below.