How can you measure the impact of your SEO efforts during startup development?

2 Choose your SEO metrics

When setting up SEO objectives, it is essential to choose the metrics that will help you track and evaluate them. SEO metrics are quantitative and qualitative indicators of how well your website or landing page is doing in terms of SEO. Examples of these metrics include organic sessions, organic impressions, organic click-through rate (CTR), keyword rankings, conversions, bounce rate, time on page, and domain authority. Organic sessions refer to the number of visits from organic sources like search engines or social media. Organic impressions refer to the number of times your website or landing page appears in the search results for a query. CTR stands for click-through rate and is the percentage of organic impressions that result in a click to your website or landing page. Keyword rankings measure the position of your website or landing page for a specific keyword or phrase in the search results. Conversions are the number of actions you want your organic visitors to take, such as signing up, downloading, purchasing, or contacting you. Bounce rate is the percentage of organic visitors who leave your website or landing page after viewing only one page. Time on page is the average amount of time that organic visitors spend on a single page of your website or landing page. Lastly, domain authority is a score that measures the quality and relevance of your website or landing page for a given topic or niche.

3 Use SEO tools

To measure your SEO metrics, you need to use SEO tools that collect and analyze data from your website or landing page and the search engines. For example, Google Analytics is a free tool that tracks and reports the traffic, behavior, and conversions of your website or landing page visitors. Additionally, Google Search Console is a free tool that monitors and improves the performance, visibility, and health of your website or landing page in the search results. Google Keyword Planner is another free tool that helps you research and plan your keywords and phrases for your website or landing page content. Paid tools such as Moz and Ahrefs offer a suite of features to optimize your website or landing page for SEO. Moz provides keyword research, rank tracking, site audit, link analysis, and domain authority while Ahrefs provides comprehensive data and insights on SEO performance such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, content analysis, and competitor analysis.

5 Test and learn

Ultimately, testing and learning from your SEO efforts is essential to remain up-to-date with the ever-changing trends, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience and the search engines. Experimenting with different keywords, content, formats, and strategies will help you measure their impact on your SEO metrics and objectives. Additionally, you should monitor best practices, guidelines, and updates from the search engines and implement them accordingly. Examples of testing and learning include A/B testing titles, descriptions, snippets, headlines, images, or calls to action; creating different types of content such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, or ebooks; trying different SEO strategies like targeting long-tail keywords or creating featured snippets; monitoring website or landing page performance for issues or errors; and following the latest news and updates from the search engines to see how they affect SEO performance.