We like long-term, full service relationships with our clients. This produces the best results. We’ve had some clients who work with us for a while and then decide they can do it in-house, and then come back, and then drop some services and then pick them back up again, and generally chop and change a lot. We know from extensive experience that the results are not as good as they are for folks who are consistent. The effectiveness of SEO depends on consistent efforts.
This is probably not amazing.
However, when you’re trying to get the best ROI at the lowest cost, it makes sense to identify which strategies are most effective. You don’t want to pay for tactics that don’t make a difference. So how can you measure the effectiveness of SEO strategies?
Before you start
Say that you are considering adding an SEO service. How can you tell what kind of results to expect? Your provider should be able to tell you. They should not be able to guarantee results, because your business and your website and your competitors are not the same as everyone else’s. You don’t expect your pediatrician to guarantee the adult height of your child, and you shouldn’t expect an SEO firm to guarantee a particular number of website visits or keyword rankings. If they do, chances are good that there is some hanky-panky going on with an eye toward faking results.
But you should be able to get information about what they usually see. Something like, “The most recent client for whom we added that service saw a 40% increase in web traffic within 3 months” would make sense. Or “a 10% increase” — it depends on lots of factors. But they should be able to share some information with you. The effectiveness of SEO is not a mysterious, hard to track issue. Effective SEO has visible results.
While you’re testing
We expect to see some results within two weeks or so. We don’t expect overnight results, because SEO doesn’t work that way. At two weeks, we want to see changes in keyword rankings or traffic.
We might not see changes in sales within two weeks. Many products have a path to purchase that lasts for 30 days or more. More eyes on your website will not result in increased sales in two weeks if your average customer thinks about their purchase for 30 days before taking the plunge.
In fact, the rule of thumb is that what you do today determines your sales 90 days from now. Your business might be different, but there’s a reason that this is a rule of thumb — it’s true a lot of the time. If you give up after two weeks, you will not see the potential ROI even if you see improved traffic and rankings. Those will show up faster, though, so they can give you a good idea of whether your efforts are going to bear fruit.
90 days in, you should be able to see real results, whatever that would mean for your website and your organization. If not, then you might want to pull the plug.
After you stop
I say you might want to pull the plug because we have seen that site owners sometimes do not recognize the results they’re getting. We’ve seen folks decide that something else entirely was responsible for the lift they saw. If they initiated several different tactics at the same time, they may not be able to tell what really made the difference. So see what happens when you stop.
In one case recently, the end of social media management meant a drop in social media traffic of 25.6% within two weeks. That’s a sign. In another case, a decision to stop blogging resulted in a 35% drop in traffic overall. Again, a clear sign. If you see results like these, you may see a comparable drop in sales within the next 90 days. You might instead choose to start up that effort again.
On the other hand, if you stop SEO efforts and you see no significant change, there is no reason to regret the end of the efforts and no reason to reinstate them.
But only if you track those metrics
It might seem as though it goes without saying, but we need to say that you can only make data-driven decisions about SEO effectiveness if you are tracking your web traffic, keyword rankings, and other web-based metrics. Yet research tells us that 85% of marketing decisions are made on the basis of gut feelings. Make sure that you are collecting data with web analytics even if you don’t feel ready to analyze it. If you don’t collect the data, you can’t analyze it in the future when you want to determine whether or not you’re getting your money’s worth.
If you’ve been collecting the data but you’re not sure how to use it to figure out how effective your SEO efforts are, Haden Interactive can help. Use the simple form below to start the conversation.
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