SEO Test 101: How to Measure Your Search Engine Optimization Efforts
You're doing SEO, but you know it takes forever
for the results to kick in. It's not gonna be three
months before you see results, it's not even six months. It's somewhere between
six months and a year. And within the first
year to the second year, that's when you really see
your SEO ranking skyrocket. I don't care what industry you're in. And if you're getting
results within a week, that means your site's already really old and has authority, but in most cases that means you're going after easy keywords that aren't gonna generate you any income. Hey, everyone. I'm Neil Patel. And today I'm gonna share with you the main key metrics you should be measuring for your SEO campaign. (light poppy music) So the first metric you should be measuring is your search traffic. You can see this within Google Analytics. Google Analytics tells you if your search traffic is going up or down. If it's going up, good for you! If it's going down, you
need to change something.
The second thing you need to do is sign up for Google Search Console. It's another free tool provided by Google and it'll show you the
number of impressions you're getting from Google. See, before you get traffic from Google, you get impressions. What an impression
means is someone's doing a search query on Google, they see your listing,
but they don't click. They may click, they may not. But in most cases, you're gonna have way more impressions than clicks. And typically, you get impressions first, because you're at the
bottom of the rankings, you're down in page three or page four, and eventually, as you
move up to page one, you get more clicks. And as you see that impression count continue climbing month over month, it means you're doing something right. If it's going down, you're
doing something wrong and you need to change
your SEO model, all right? The third strategy I
have for you, or more so, third metric that you need
to be tracking is backlinks.
Use ahrefs.com. When you're using ahrefs, it'll show you how many people are linking to you. And you don't wanna just
track your backlinks. You wanna track how many
backlinks you're getting, and how many backlinks your
competitors are getting, and who's growing faster. If you're growing faster
than your competitors, and you're getting more
authoritative natural links, you're not buying them,
which you shouldn't, you're in a good place. The fourth thing you need to be measuring is how much content you're producing. If you're producing four
articles a week, good for you. If you're producing one a week, it's gonna take you forever to do well in the search landscape? Ideally, you need to be producing three or more articles
per week, at minimum.
You should try to wanna
go to one or two a day, you could even go to five or six a day, but that's just overboard. I've tested it out, it's a lot of work, and yes, you do get more
search traffic over time, but the more content you produce, there's more keywords that Google can potentially index you for. The last metric I want you to track is number of index pages. Your Google Search Console will show you how many index pages you have.
If you have it, you wanna submit a site map
to Google Search Console. If you're running on WordPress, use the Yoast SEO plugin. That plugin makes it easy, where it automatically creates
a site map, updates it, and tells Google every time
you have a new blog post. Measure those metrics and you'll know if you're on the right path. If your numbers are all going down, then you should adjust your SEO strategy and something you're doing is not working. If they're going all up, do
more of what you're doing! (light poppy music).
