How do you know when your SEO campaign is dying?
The benefits of SEO are hardly quantitative. For example, brand visibility is more qualitative and even inbound traffic can be arbitrary, varied, and difficult to interpret. Measuring the efficiency of your SEO campaign with absolute accuracy can be challenging.
Industry leaders like SearchEngineJournal.com and the likes of SEOReseller.com understand the challenges that come with gauging the strength of your campaigns. There are noticeable red flags, but there are also blind spots in your assessments and conclusions. These experts suggest these signs your campaign could do better:
Stagnant Growth
SEO is geared for long-term growth. An effective campaign should consistently be geared towards increased over-all traffic and ranking. While consistent numbers for several months do not always equate to something negative, growth is important.
A tough month of stagnation can cost you what could have been several weeks of growth. If your campaign remains stagnant for several months and all the figures are not moving an inch, it’s time to reconsider your strategy.
Drop in Traffic
Organic traffic is one of the best measures of your SEO campaign’s efficiency. There are several ways this can be measured, and there are also many ways to break down these numbers. Checking these statistics should be a habit and once a large drop in organic traffic is apparent, it should be a call to action.
It’s ideal to track this at least weekly. Be on the lookout for sharp drops and alarming differences in number. For example, if your average number of hits a week reaches four-digit numbers and it suddenly deflates to 100, there’s probably a major problem somewhere.
Drop in KW Rankings
Although most SEO specialists would rank keywords as the least pivotal, they are still valuable in the assessment of your campaign’s health. Keep a handful of keywords as your targets to measure and if there is any noticeable decline on majority of these, it’s also a red flag.
Some of these are not easy to miss, but some are more of a nuance than it is a sign. Several small and starting businesses fail midway because of SEO campaigns that fail. Sometimes, it’s smarter for beginning companies to hire an external body to do all the work while they have yet to learn the ropes.