How can I track if my SEO strategy is effective?

This is a question that popped up on the free training class recently, and it’s such a good one that I wanted to address it on the blog and podcast, too. If you’ve been trying to do SEO for a while, I bet you’ve found yourself wondering how can I track if my SEO strategy is effective (you might not have said it exactly that way, maybe you’ve just wondered, is my SEO working?).

When you’re working on SEO, you’re likely putting a significant amount of time and effort into creating the right content for your audience and optimizing it to help them find it quickly and easily. I ran a reader survey recently, and about 70% of the respondents said they were spending up to 5 hours a week on their Marketing and SEO. 17% were spending 6-10 hours a week, and the remaining 13% were spending 10 or more hours a week.

If you’re spending 1-2 hours a day on marketing your business, you want to know that what you’re doing is paying off. That’s a significant time investment, right?

So how can you track if your SEO strategy is working?

There are specific things I track to know if my SEO strategy is working or needs to be updated. I do take a look at keyword ranking, but honestly, it’s less important to me today than it was 10 years ago. Heck, it’s less important today than it was even 1-2 years ago. Yes, we want to rank for keywords, but we also want to be included in AI search results, and you don’t have to rank high on Google to be included in AI search results, so today, in my opinion, keyword ranking is less important than it has been in the past.

Start with SEO keyword rankings (but don’t end there!)

Take a look at your keywords, check to see where you’re at and what’s working for you, but don’t depend on that metric alone to determine if what you’re doing is working. Today’s SEO strategies should be for Google and AI-based searching like ChatGPT and Perplexity, but keyword rankings are only for Google.

Are you visible in AI search?

This is a newer metric, but something important to watch for because AI-based search is exploding in popularity. You’ll want to track and see if you’re getting traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others. You can easily check this by looking at your analytics dashboard.

Look at your website traffic

Are you getting website traffic from Google? It will show up as organic in your Google Analytics reports, and it’s going to show up under Searches in Clicky Analytics. You want to see first if there is traffic coming from organic search or searches in your report.

Look at your lead generation tracking

Are you bringing the right people to your site with your SEO strategy? If you’re getting traffic but not generating any leads, there’s likely a breakdown somewhere in your funnel. You want to make sure your site has an opt-in form on the pages that are getting traffic so that you can hopefully generate leads. If you don’t have that set up, that’s step #1: get that opt-in or freebie on all of your website or blog pages so that as you get traffic, you can start to generate leads.

From there, check to see if people are joining your list from the opt-ins. If they aren’t there’s something wrong. If they are, you’re probably on the right track.

You need someone to look at YOUR numbers, YOUR content, YOUR traffic sources, and tell you what it means.

That's exactly what I teach in Simple SEO Content. You learn how to:

• Read your data (not just collect it)
• Know which metrics matter (and which to ignore)
• Understand if you're making progress (even when it doesn't feel like it)
• Make confident decisions (instead of guessing)

How often should you check your SEO data to know if your strategy is working?

I check my website analytics and keyword rankings monthly. You don’t have to do it weekly. Remember that SEO will take time to work, so you might not start to see results for a few months. I’ve seen blog posts end up on Page 1 of Google within 3-6 months and start driving traffic, and other times, it’s taken a year or more for it to get to the top of Page 1.  A keyword with less competition will likely rank a bit faster than one that’s more competitive.

Are you ready to make sure your SEO strategy is effective?

If you’re ready to stop guessing and know that what you’re doing will work and your SEO strategy is effective, join me in Simple SEO Content and let me walk you through exactly what to do for both Google and AI-based SEO. I’ll help you figure out which keywords to target, where to use them, what content to create for your audience, and how to generate leads from the traffic you get. Let’s work together, either in Simple SEO Content or 1:1 in Marketing Consulting, to get your business found online and grow your leads and sales.