How long does it take to see results from SEO?
The typical answer to that question is 4 to 6 months.
However, you should in mind that the biggest factor affecting this timeline is the condition of your website when you implement your SEO strategy.
Here’s what I mean by the “condition” of your site:
- Is it penalized by Google? Recovery from a Google penalty has been reported to take anywhere from days to a year or more.
- What are your initial keyword rankings?
- Does your website have a lot of technical errors?
- Is there a large amount of duplicate content that needs to be resolved?
- How well developed are your site’s external and internal linking structures?
- A poorly organized website that is difficult to navigate, or a really old website can certainly make implementing an SEO plan more difficult.
How do you measure the success of an SEO campaign?
At Boomtown, we use Google Analytics to track pretty much everything on our client’s website. If you’re not using it to monitor your site, you should be. It’s an extremely useful tool.
To measure the success of an SEO campaign, I’m going to look at changes in the following areas:
- Is overall traffic to the website increasing? And more specifically, is organic traffic going up?
- Monitor keywords- ranking, impressions and clicks
- New vs. returning users are coming to the site.
- How much time these visitors are spending on the website overall and on certain pages.
- For e-Commerce: monitor any movement in metrics such as the total number of transactions and the average amount of money spent on each order.
- Track submissions for items like Contact and Request a Quote forms or downloads of PDFs.