Sometimes, website owners are doing the best they can and not sure if their efforts bring results. Confused with all the factors that are affecting SEO, it’s is often hard for small businesses to track down the fruits of their efforts to make sure they are doing a good job. In this article, we’re going to reveal the crucial factors in measuring the success of a local SEO campaign. However, there’s something to be aware of before we dive into these metrics. Every successful SEO campaign takes time to show results. As it is composed of several different factors, it needs more time to make them work together, reach customers and bring more conversions and leases. So, if you are wondering if your strategy is successful enough, continue reading.
Check your organic traffic to measure the success of a local SEO campaign
After starting a local SEO campaign, one of the main metrics that show success is organic traffic. This kind of traffic is not created by ads, but these website visits happen through search results. Therefore, they are not ‘forced’, yet totally organic. When you launch a successful strategy, you can expect more organic traffic and therefore recognize your customers’ needs. According to organic traffic results, you can check what are the interests of the visitors and create more suitable content that meets their needs. As a result, organic traffic that happened due to relevant and interesting content helps your Google search rankings and improve website visibility.
How to check organic traffic? You can see your results through Google Analytics. Visit your account and under ‘Overview’, you’ll find the ‘organic traffic‘ page.
Keywords
It can’t be stressed enough how important keywords are for your local SEO. Analyzing keyword rankings that are relevant to your business is crucial for connecting customers with your content, products, or services. After doing thorough keyword research, you’ll be able to tell if you’re using the right phrases on your website. As a result, you will see your website in the top search results on Google or Bing, showing that the content on the website corresponds that the most important keywords related to your niche.
More backlinks
A successful SEO is shown through the number of backlinks its pages receive. Mentions on other websites, referrals from other businesses, reviews – all of these are indicators of your website’s value and relevance. These links are very important in boosting the ranking, too – however, there’s a catch. The biggest success and the highest ranking will be given to the natural-looking backlinks. Therefore, investing time and effort in high-quality content will certainly pay off. In the end, you only need to track new backlinks and referring domains to see you’re moving in a good direction.
The way to track these is quite simple. There are several tools you can use, just be sure that the one you pick meets your needs. It’s best that it updates the results frequently, shows accurate results of both follow and no-follow links, and presents your results in a way you can track them over a certain period of time. This way you can see the trends and results since you’ve started a certain SEO strategy.
Organic conversions
The amount of traffic you get on the website is not always the same, as well as its quality. The important part is focusing on the traffic that brings leads and sales. Sometimes, there can be a lot of traffic that is pretty irrelevant. Therefore, you should track organic conversions, to be able to measure the success of a local SEO campaign. In this case, it is important to be realistic in terms of your goals. Take both time frame, invested efforts, and realistic objects into account. Make sure you know what you expect from your strategies, so you can determine if it is successful or not. Next, use Google Analytics to check the results, or use a tool or a widget that can help you track conversion rates over a certain period of time.
Reaching the right audience
One of the main goals of every local SEO strategy, done by professionals such as AZ Citation Services, is reaching the target audience and making the brand visible locally. There are several ways to do this – one of them is tracking Google Maps searches at your Google My Business page. This can help you track the number of searches, as well as clicks, calls, and other information. And if you narrow your metrics by location, you can easily see if the local people are seeing and visiting your business on Google.
Reviews
More reviews show that your strategy is creating more engagement, and reaches the right audience. Even though people sometimes underestimate the power of reviews on Google, Bing, Yelp, and similar websites, you should know that building citations and genuine reviews are a valuable indicator of SEO success. Firstly, more honest and legitimate reviews can give you a better ranking in searches. Next, you get valuable information from your existing customers about their experience, needs, and opinions. And finally, positive reviews will convince all the potential customers to buy your products or services. All of these show that you need to pay special attention to what people say about your business and track the number of reviews as one of the signs of success.
There are a couple of ways you can check if your efforts are giving any results. We hope that these tactics will help you measure the success of a local SEO campaign and ensure your business is going in the right direction. Give it some time to see the results, and be realistic about your goals – achieve milestones strategically, one by one. This is the only way to build a solid foundation of your business and ensure the online presentation gives a positive outcome over time.
