How do I know if I'm doing SEO right

You’re trying to do SEO on your website or blog, and that’s great! I want that for you because it’s key to visibility online. But do you ever find yourself wondering if you’re doing it right? If you’ve ever wondered if you’re doing SEO right, I want you to know that you are 100% not alone. When meeting with new students or clients, they often tell me that they’ve been trying to do SEO on their own and have even SEO’ed the heck out of everything (this isn’t necessarily a good thing, and I’ll tell you why in a minute), but they’re not sure if it’s working and don’t really know how to check.

When I first start working with a new SEO client, I run a quick audit to understand what’s been done and if it’s right or needs to be adjusted. I did one of these earlier this week and thought you might like to know what I look at to determine if SEO is working on a website, so I decided to write this post for you.

What to check to figure out if SEO is working

The first thing I look at is a site’s analytics. I want to understand how much organic traffic they’re getting and which pages. Sometimes a site is getting a lot of traffic, so it looks great, but upon further inspection, I realize it’s only one or two pages that are driving the majority of the traffic, and they’re not ones that are going to convert visitors into buyers easily. When this happens, I adjust the strategy for the client or students and have them focus on the pages that lead to more sales, not just more traffic.

For example, I was reviewing the site for my new client the other day, and at first glance, the SEO looked like it was working well. They’re getting a few hundred visits a month from organic, and it’s pretty consistent traffic. They are ranking for a few keywords, and things look positive. However, when I moved from just the traffic numbers and looked at the actual content that’s getting organic traffic, I realized 90% of the traffic was to one blog post, and that post, while engaging, wasn’t one that was designed to convert. The conversion pages, things like the course and coaching program pages, were getting almost no organic traffic.

It's important to make sure the right pages are getting organic traffic if you want to make money.

How do you figure out if the right pages are getting traffic?

You’ll want to use an analytics program like Google Analytics or Clicky (which is quickly becoming my new favorite, super-easy-to-use analytics tool) to look at your website analytics. Now, if you don’t have an analytics program set up on your site yet, you won’t be able to view historical data, so go ahead and get it set up, and then look at the information in a month or so. If you already have analytics data, then what you’ll want to do is search for the organic traffic and see which pages have gotten traffic over the past 12-18 months. I like to look back at least a year so that I can really understand how the site does over the course of an entire year, because some sites are impacted by seasonality and have more or less traffic during certain months of the year.

 Are the right pages getting traffic?

Now you’re going to analyze the data. Are the right pages bringing in organic traffic? The pages in the organic report are the ones that are most likely showing up more often on Google because if they weren’t showing up high on Google, they wouldn’t be getting traffic from search.

You want to think about the pages that lead to direct conversions for your business. If you sell products or services on your website, do the pages for your offers get organic traffic? If you have a consult call page on your site, you want to see if it’s getting organic traffic. Is your homepage getting much? What about your About page? Which pages are getting the organic traffic on your site, and are they the ones that lead to conversions?

I’ve had several clients over the years who had lots of organic traffic for specific pages that had nothing to do with their businesses. They were frustrated because they were doing SEO, they were getting traffic, but no one was buying anything because they were bringing in people who weren’t interested in what they sell.

What if the wrong pages are getting traffic? 

This is where our marketing strategy comes in, and it’s my favorite part. If you’re getting organic traffic, but it’s to the wrong pages, then you need to make adjustments. You always want to focus on the pages that bring in leads and sales first, and then supplemental pages.

If your product or service pages aren’t driving organic traffic, then they’re also likely not ranking high on Google. You’ll want to review your SEO elements on those pages and make adjustments to try to get them ranking so they can drive traffic.

If you’re using a keyword ranking reporting tool like Ubersuggest, you should know whether or not the keyword is ranking on Google yet. If it’s ranking anywhere above position 10 it’s likely not getting much traffic. You need to adjust your SEO to try to help that keyword rank higher.

What if you don’t know what’s broken or how to fix it?

I’m here to help. I love working on projects like this and figuring out which pages are ranking, which ones aren’t, and which ones should be. I can work with you one-on-one, or you can participate in a group program, and I’ll show you how to figure it out, and more importantly, how to get the right pages ranking so that you know your SEO is working and you start getting more traffic, leads, and sales.

SEO isn’t actually super hard. It’s about having the right strategy in place and using it to connect with the right customers online, wherever they’re searching.

If you’ve been working on your SEO for at least 6 months and you’re not seeing traffic to the most important pages on your website, you've likely made a mistake somewhere and need some extra help and guidance to fix things. It won’t just magically work because you’ve done SEO. You have to do it right, and there are quite a few nuances to what “right” is when it comes to SEO. I’d love to help you figure it out and get it working, if you’d like my help.