Analyzing Your SEO Campaign in Three Ways to Know that it was a Failure
Businesses who need long-term solution for gaining more search visibility and more site traffic for their brand rely on search engine optimization, and many big business enterprises spend more dollars into this internet marketing strategy to stay ahead of their competitors in the same industry. When it comes to accurately measuring the effectiveness of an SEO strategy, many industry experts say that it can be a challenging task. Many of the advantages that you gain via SEO like improved brand visibility are subjective and therefore somewhat difficult to analyze, and even target parameters such as inbound web traffic can be subject to random variation and become difficult to interpret.
After you have maintained an search optimization campaign for more than a few months, however, you should have enough information to form meaningful conclusions from your data. Most importantly, you will be able to check in regularly to see if there are any red flags that alert you that something wrong with your campaign. These red flags can be difficult to detect, but if you know what to look for, you should have no issue spotting them and rectifying those errors immediately.
Reducing Organic Search Traffic
For SEO professionals, organic search traffic is an important factor which refers to the number of users who found your website via Google and other search engines. And it is one of the best metrics we have to determine the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. To determine your organic traffic, you need to log into your Google Analytics account and click on “Acquisitions”. Here, you will see a breakdown of how many visits your website received from organic sources, social media, direct visits and referrals.
You can click into the organic visits to gain some additional details on your organic traffic sources, but the key number is the one we are most concerned with. You need to monitor the traffic on a weekly or monthly basis. While you should be seeing some long term growth patterns, what you really want to look for is any drop in the numbers. For instance, if you are used to seeing thousand hits a week and that unusually drops to two-hundred, you might have a major issue on your hands.
No Long-term Growth
The main goal of every internet marketing campaign is achieving long term growth. You should see an overall pattern toward increased web traffic if you check back on a consistent basis, month after month. Even though organic search behavior is difficult to predict due to the intervention of Google, there are some key factors by which we can arrive at a possible outcome. Do not panic if you notice a stagnant growth in traffic for a month in particular. However, if your marketing campaign remains dormant for 2-3 months, then you might have a serious problem. Everyone expects steady and measurable growth in terms of organic search traffic, and if you start seeing a decline or stagnant figures, then you call it as a red flag. There are instances where multiple months of consistent traffic do not necessarily mean your SEO campaign is failing you do not want to take the gamble by keeping things the same for another month.
Low Rankings for Your Targeted Keywords
There was a time when keywords meant everything to SEO, and getting one to rank highly meant you had found success. Today, keywords are less significant, since Google decode user search terms based on intent, instead of keyword phrases, your ranks are much more fluid. It is more important to have relevant, quality content than it is to have a content-based around certain keywords. However, your rankings are still a valuable metric to measure because they can indicate the effectiveness of your search optimization campaign. You need to keep a handful of keywords as your targets to measure, and check your ranking on them every once in a while. If you notice your rankings falling on a majority of those keywords, this is a red flag for your SEO campaign.
These are 3 main signals that your SEO campaign is failing and you need to undertake corrective measures as soon as possible. You need to identify the source of all your troubles and then you have to work on the issue(s) for days or weeks to repair the damage left by your flawed tactics in your SEO campaign. If you find this process difficult, you can get help from experts who can sort out the issue within minimum turnaround.
