Don’t be fooled! Positioning – how to measure the effects of an SEO agency?

Don't be fooled! Positioning - how to measure the effects of an SEO agency?

Positioning is a service that takes time. You should wait several weeks or even months for the effects. Unfortunately, there are often situations when companies that perform positioning are reluctant to inform clients about what steps they have taken. In Silence! we do not support this type of activity. That is why we present a short guide below, which - we hope - will allow business owners or people who supervise Internet marketing to find out whether these activities are carried out correctly or not.

Site statistics

I'll start by visiting the site. It's best to use a statistics system to monitor this parameter, e.g. Google Analytics. This is the most popular tool at the moment, so I will show you how to do it on its basis.

After logging in to Google Analytics, go to the tab: Acquisition -> All traffic -> Source / medium. Then a report will show us which presents the amount of traffic from individual sources. In the table with all traffic sources click google / organic and we have filtered traffic only from natural Google search results

It should be remembered that by default the data and chart refer to the period of the last 7 days, it is worth choosing a period that is longer - preferably a few weeks or months. Let's also start verification from the moment you start positioning. Sample chart:

For the readability of the chart, it's a good idea to mark the monthly (upper right corner of the chart) instead of the daily one. What if the chart does not look like the above? Ie. if we see a constant level of visits or worse - there are declines.This is not a moment to panic, you need to consider the element of trends in the industry. It may happen that at the time of our research, searchability is underestimated. Then check two things:

• if we have Google Analytics installed on the website for more than a year, it is worth comparing with the previous year,

• let's use the Google Trends tool to check for our most searched phrases what the yearly trend looks like.

Below is an example of a site that has been dropping quite a lot since the beginning of the year:

If you only look at the blue line (current period), you might think that positioning activities have a catastrophic effect, but looking at the chart in the year-to-year range (orange line) you can see a big difference in the number of visits for the current year.

This is a chart for an industry heavily dependent on trends, which is highly searchable every year around New Year's Eve.

Views in Google search results

Another place where we can look at the effects of our activities is the Google Search Console tool. Go to the Performance -> Search results report, where we will see the number of visits from Google, the number of views of our page on Google and average positions.When we do not see increases in Google Analytics visits or they are insignificant, it is worth checking in Google Search Console how our Google search engine looks. Below is an example of a chart where we can see that the number of clicks on our website in Google results is more or less constant (blue line), but the number of views increases significantly (green line):

What could be the reason for this situation? It may happen that our page will be on the first page of Google for some phrases, which will result in a significant increase in views of our page. But because the site is in a low position (e.g. 9 or 10) users still rarely click on it. Because of this, we don't see an increase in visits. So SEO positioning works in some respects, but you should work on improving your position.

A very common mistake is that policy makers / analysts look at the average position graph for the entire site and expect average position increases. It is not the right way to look at the results. The website, being reliably optimized, will appear on more and more keywords for which it has not appeared before. It is natural that these positions will be initially lower, thus the average position parameter will be lowered.

What if I don't see an increase in visits or impressions and my industry is not trendy?

Google page visibility

Then I suggest using external tools that will show how many keywords the page is visible in Google search engine. They are e.g. Senuto or SEMStorm. These tools view Google search results for millions of phrases, then count for which phrases and in what positions websites are visible. Using this tool for your website you can check the graph for how many key phrases the page was visible in top 3/10/10 in a selected period of time. As I mentioned before - a thoroughly optimized page should be visible in more key phrases, which should translate into increased visibility.

The above graph shows the start of positioning activities. But what if you can't see growth? First of all, look at all the top3, top10 and top50 charts. Cascade, if the top3 chart does not show effects, then we look at top10, if top10 does not show effects, then we look at top50. If we don't see results in top50 and our site has been positioned for several weeks, then the red light should light up.

Finally, an example of the page visibility chart, which I presented earlier, where since January we have seen a decrease in visits (trends).

As you can see, visibility in top10 is stable here with a slight upward trend.

Number of links leading to the page

SEO Positioning is based on two elements: website optimization and link building. When evaluating positioning effects, it's worth looking at the graph of the number of leading links to the page. External tools are needed to evaluate this and in most cases these are paid tools. We use Ahrefs.com. What is worth paying attention to? The number of domains leading to the website. After starting cooperation, you should see an increase in the number of these domains.

It may happen that this chart does not show the increase in the number of domains leading to the site, then it is worth asking the SEO company why that is so. SEO agency might say that they get links in places that are blocked from link monitoring tools. Then we can check the links leading in Google Search Console. Those cannot be blocked. If you don't see links here, then talk to the agency.

Page positions on Google for selected keywords

Finally, the last factor to consider when analyzing SEO effects is the position of the page in Google search engine for selected keywords. I left it at the end because we feel that better positions of only a few key phrases do not always translate into a significant increase in website traffic. We still often encounter situations that phrases are chosen unreliably by "SEO agencies". And there are situations when customer pages are in the first positions for keywords that are so rarely searched that this does not translate into increased website traffic. In addition, Google today geolocates its search results and it may happen that we achieve the highest positions for the selected key phrase, but we have these positions only in our town. If the town is small - the effect is negligible.If our site is new or has never been positioned - the effect of keyword growth should be visible. In the first period, key phrases should gain dynamic positions. Later, depending on the competitiveness of the industry, key phrases should achieve the first permanent positions. In some industries this is possible in a month, in others - after a few months. However, you should remember to carefully check the frequency of searches on key phrases, e.g. in the keyword planner.

Analysis of positioning effects – summary

Analysis of the effects of positioning strongly depends on the situation of the site. For a newly created site, the analysis of effects should be easy, for older page it may be more difficult. But with the above points in mind, you can easily analyze your positioning activities and draw conclusions. As some of the tools to do the proper analysis are paid it is worth commissioning this task to an agency - such as ours - to analyze the situation. I strongly encourage you to analyze the effects more holistically than just by looking at the position of key phrases. And that is due to the fact that in the real world Google dumps natural results in web search engine in order to promote paid ones.

That is why it is worth looking at SEO activities as a continuous increase of visibility in Google results. Customers are increasingly entering multi-word key phrases, and Google says 15% of daily phrases searched for are phrases that have never been entered before!

If your website requires SEO audit in order to gain more traffic and sales then please contact us and we will be glad to help!