What’s in this article:
- The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to guide visitors down the marketing funnel, converting leads into full-fledged customers
- Domain authority, organic traffic, and conversions can tell you a great deal about the health of your marketing funnel
Search engine optimization is a critical tool for attracting customers in 2020, but there are more success indicators than your Google rankings alone. Metrics such as organic traffic, domain authority, and conversions are all promising signs that your SEO efforts are bearing fruit. When reviewing your campaigns, look at the following metrics:
High rankings for targeted keywords
The simplest indicator of a successful SEO campaign is that your web pages rank on Google Search results. Making the first page of rankings is a good sign, but it’s not enough to rank for just any keyword. You should optimize web pages for terms that reflect your audience’s precise needs, even if that means ranking for keywords with a lower volume of monthly searches. Using Optimove’s wheelhouse as an example, people search for “customer retention rate” less frequently than “customer retention” — but it’s also more focused on a specific user need.
Don’t forget that rankings can vary by region and platform, so make sure to check for variables that best serve your business. Websites like Moz offer excellent SEO tools to measure keyword search traffic and how difficult it is to gain a foothold for each term.
Users search “customer retention rate” less frequently than “customer retention” — but it’s also more focused on a specific user need.”
Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: Monitoring the User’s Heartbeat
What Does It Mean to Treat a Customer’s Email With Respect?
To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)
What the Efforts to Promote Responsible Gaming Look Like Form the Inside
Domain authority growth
Keyword rankings are a quick way to measure an SEO campaign’s success, although it isn’t always the most useful. A better measure of SEO performance is your domain authority, which summarizes your website’s relevance to the overall industry. DA goes a few steps beyond rankings to consider your web content quality, your brand’s prestige, and how aggressively you pursue vital topics within your industry.
Building a strong domain authority takes time but has a far more significant impact on your search rankings than any single web page. If you want to position your brand as a valuable industry resource, focusing on DA will serve you well.
Strong organic traffic
For most businesses, SEO campaigns aim to attract users to your website, measured by growth in organic traffic. This KPI tracks the number of visitors who click on unpaid search links, which is distinct from any paid advertising space. Targeting organic traffic growth is immensely valuable because it’s an evergreen strategy. As long as you regularly optimize your web pages, you can sit back and attract the same number of visitors each month.
Of course, regular visitors — as valuable as they are — aren’t nearly as important as paying customers. Which is why the final KPI for an SEO campaign should be: high organic conversion rate.
High organic conversion rate
The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to guide visitors down the marketing funnel, converting leads into full-fledged customers. When it comes to SEO campaigns, organic conversion rates can measure the number of paying customers from the total search traffic volume. You can draw these numbers from Google Analytics or a third-party platform, but they are the final word on SEO effectiveness and your marketing funnel’s efficiency.
In fact, analyzing each of these metrics — from domain authority to organic traffic to conversions — can tell you a great deal about the health of your marketing funnel itself. If nothing else, it reminds us of how SEO drives our brand relationships with customers new and old.