You're doing SEO test, but you know it takes forever for the results to kick in. It's not going to be three months before you see results, it's not even six months. It's somewhere between six months and a year.
And within the first year of the second year, that's when you see your SEO ranking skyrocket.
I don't care what industry you're in.
And if you're getting results within a week, that means your site's already really old and has authority, but in most cases that means you're going after easy keywords that aren't going to generate you any income.
Hey, everyone. I'm Neil Patel. And today I'm going to share with you the main key metrics you should measure for your SEO campaign and how to SEO test the right way.
So the first SEO test you should be measuring is your search traffic.
You can see this in Google Analytics. Google Analytics tells you if your search traffic is going up or down.
If it's going up, good for you! If it's going down, you need to change something.
The second thing you need to do to SEO test is sign up for Google Search Console. It's another free tool provided by Google, and it'll show you the number of impressions you're getting from Google. See, before you get traffic from Google, you get impressions.
What an impression means is someone's doing a search query on Google, they see your listing, but they don't click. They may click, they may not. But in most cases, you're going to have way more impressions than clicks.
And typically, you get impressions first, because you're at the bottom of the rankings, you're down in page three or page four, and eventually, as you move up to page one, you get more clicks.
And as you see that impression count continue climbing month over month, it means you're doing something right.
If it's going down, you're doing something wrong, and you need to change your SEO model, all right?
The third SEO test strategy I have for you, or more so, a third metric that you need to be tracking is backlinks.
Use ahrefs.com. When you're using ahrefs, it'll show you how many people are linking to you. And you don't want to just track your backlinks.
You want to track how many backlinks you're getting, and how many backlinks your competitors are getting, and who's growing faster.
If you're growing faster than your competitors, and you're getting more authoritative natural links, you're not buying them, which you shouldn't, you're in a good place.
The fourth SEO test you need to be measuring is how much content you're producing.
If you're producing four articles a week, good for you. If you're producing one a week, it's going to take you forever to do well in the search landscape.
Ideally, you need to be producing three or more articles per week, at a minimum.
You should try to go to one or two a day, you could even go to five or six a day, but that's just overboard with your SEO website.
I've tested it out, it's a lot of work, and yes, you do get more search traffic over time, but the more content you produce, there are more keywords that Google can potentially index you for.
The last metric I want you to track is some index pages.
Your Google Search Console will show you how many index pages you have.
If you have it, you want to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. If you're running on WordPress, use the Yoast SEO plugin.
That plugin makes it easy, where it automatically creates a sitemap, updates it, and tells Google every time you have a new blog post.
Measure those metrics, and you'll know if you're on the right path.
If your numbers are all going down, then you should adjust your SEO strategy, and something you're doing is not working. If they're going all up, do more of what you're doing! That's how you properly SEO test your optimization efforts.
