What Should You Expect From Your SEO Campaigns?
Whether you’re a client, or even the person in charge of the SEO campaign, you should always have accurate goals and expectations in place. If not, you won’t have anything to measure your SEO efforts against. This means that your campaign could be performing exceptionally, or worse, it could really suck.
In any case, you need to know what to expect from your campaigns. Some client’s expect the world, whilst others are happy with a steady management. The truth about SEO is that the more time and money you invest, invariably the better the outcome of your campaign. However, this is dependent on a few things.
First and foremost, effective campaigns are achieved if the person managing them actually knows what they are doing. This means utilising the latest and greatest SEO tools and techniques. It also means achieving the most out of the time given to them. Efficient SEOers are far better than those who dawdle. However, even if you have the best SEOer in the world optimising your site, you also have to consider your industry. If you have a particularly competitive industry, and are looking to achieve high rankings for very popular keywords, your campaign may not be as successful as one which is for a less competitive industry. In other words, expectations need to be managed.
Once you know what to expect, you can start to measure the success of your campaigns against a few benchmarks. It’s important to remember what we’ve previously mentioned. Successful campaigns are based on a lot factors; the industry, the amount of work needed on a particular website, the time given for the campaign, and the agency or consultant working on them. So what should you be looking out for when it comes to successful campaigns?
Rankings
The position that your website is ranking within the SERPs for targeted keywords is a good indicator in terms of campaign success. If there are particular keywords for which you’d like your site to rank, then keep check on their positions within the SERPs. Some keywords are easier than others to rank, based on their competitiveness and popularity.
Site Traffic
The amount of organic traffic coming to your site through brand and non-brand keywords is another benchmark to measure the success of your campaign against. Whilst it’s nice to see traffic always rise, it’s not the end of the world if there are a few slips. There’s many reasons why this may be the case, including seasonal trends. By and large, a year-on-year traffic analysis should show rises, assuming the campaign has run smoothly.
Brand Visibility
Ranking for your branded keywords is another consideration. This refers to keywords that use your company name. Whether this means mentions on social media, or visibility within the search engines, it’s good to increase the amount of times that your brand is searched for and mentioned online. Branding is a huge aspect in SEO, so it’s important to factor this into your campaigns.
Site Authority
During optimisation of a website, an increase in links, as well as the aforementioned SEO benchmarks, will help to improve your authority within the search engines. This is closely related to your keyword rankings, but is also determined by the number and quality of links pointed towards your website. One ranking factor to look out for here would be PageRank, but it’s important to remember that PageRank only factors in the number and quality of links pointed towards your site, it doesn’t consider the other important SEO factors that we’ve previously mentioned.
