Want to know how to measure SEO results? This guide covers the key metrics and methods to measure your SEO performance. You’ll learn how to track revenue, leads, organic traffic, keyword rankings, CTR, conversions and ROI from your SEO.
- Key Takeaways
- Measuring Revenue From SEO
- Asking Customers Directly
- Common Metrics To Measure SEO Results
- Leads
- Tracking Organic Traffic
- Monitoring Keyword Rankings
- Evaluating Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Measuring Conversions from Organic Traffic
- Calculating ROI for SEO Efforts
- How We Measure SEO Results At eWebsites
- Frequently Asked Questions
Key Takeaways
- Revenue tracking for SEO requires strong tools and accurate attribution across multiple touchpoints to see the direct impact on business growth.
- Lead quality and relevance are key for measuring SEO success, especially for service based businesses where lead tracking helps predict ROI and refine strategies.
- Using Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console to track organic traffic and conversions gives you insight into your SEO and helps with data driven decision making and strategy optimisation.
Measuring Revenue From SEO
Measuring the true impact of your SEO requires calculating the revenue generated directly from your SEO efforts. For e-commerce, this is relatively easy.
For service-based businesses, however, it’s more complicated. These business don’t have a tangible product, so working out the direct revenue from services is more complex.
One of the big challenges is revenue attribution.
For example a customer might find your service through an organic search but convert through a different channel. So a system for accurate tracking and attribution of revenue across multiple touchpoints is key.
Some tools that can help with this are:
- Google Analytics 4: a powerful tool to see the journey of your website visitors
- CRM software: to track customer interactions and conversions (we personally use GoHighlevel)
- Marketing automation platforms: to see customer behavior and engagement across different channels
By using these tools you can see your revenue channels and make data driven decisions to optimise your marketing.
However, relying on customer self reporting can be inaccurate. Customers may not always remember how they found your business or they may attribute their discovery to a different source. So multiple tracking tools and methods are required.
For example using UTM parameters with Google Analytics 4 can show you exactly where your traffic and conversions are coming from.
Strong lead tracking tools like CRM systems can bridge the gap between your SEO and revenue. These tools can help you:
- See the progress of leads from organic traffic
- Make sure every potential customer is accounted for
- Understand the correlation between your SEO and revenue
- Make data driven decisions for marketing campaign optimisation
Therefore, for service-based business what we found is the best way to measure leads is tracking the number of people who contacted your business either through submitting a contact form or by calling you.
This will give you a good proportion of how well SEO is doing and it can enable you to determine an ROI for this type of service.
Asking Customers Directly
By asking a question like “How did you hear about us?” in your customer interactions you can gather qualitative data that complements your quantitative tracking. This will help you see which channels are working and refine your SEO accordingly.
However, customer self reporting may not always be accurate. Customers may not always remember the exact source or attribute their discovery to a different channel.
Even if they can correlate that they found your business from ‘Google’, a lot of them will not be able to distinguish between paid and organic results.
Below you can see an example of Google’s SERP which consists of paid, local (google maps) and organic results. If you are an experienced marketer you would easily understand the difference between the three, however, if you are not, it’s unlikely that you know (or care) whether you clicked on an ad or a local map to reach out your business.
So why does this even matter? Well if you are paying for both Google Ads and SEO you want to be able to distinguish which channel is generating more leads so you can determine your overall marketing ROI.
What we found is the best way to get a more accurate picture of where your leads are coming from is to use contact forms and call tracking softwares on your website. These methods are very accurate at tracking the pages that they visited you and made the enquiry or call and what keywords they utilised to find you.
Common Metrics To Measure SEO Results
When evaluating the success of your SEO, there are several key metrics to focus on. These metrics will give you insight into different aspects of your SEO and allow you to make data driven decisions and optimise for better results. Below are the ones we identified as the most important in their perspective order:
- Leads
- Tracking Organic Traffic
- Monitoring Keyword Rankings
- Evaluating Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Measuring Conversions from Organic Traffic
- Calculating ROI for SEO Efforts
Leads
