How To Know If Your SEO Strategy Is Working? [SEO Audit]

With the right knowledge, get a better measure of the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns. Learn whether your current SEO efforts can lead to more conversions.

A healthy website attracts viewers. You put time and effort into launching an effective search engine optimization campaign. However, the benefits of SEO can take time to develop. In today’s fast-paced world, marketers want to see results right away. While you’re waiting to see if your website appears on the top search results, how do you know if your SEO efforts are working?

How To Know If Your SEO Strategy Is Working?

Whether you want to handle SEO yourself or you're outsourcing the work to an SEO agency, it’s important to know the ways to find out:

A Spring Clean Content

High quality content may be among the most effective metrics to consider. It is the most critical strategy for SEO. Always remember Google likes content that is new and refreshing to the eyes of your viewers. If you have overlooked a content check up on your website for the past few years, now is the time for you to do the opposite. Otherwise, your website's content will no longer appear among the most relevant pages. Website owners are launching new articles consistently. With this, Google will place your age-old content after those recently launched websites.

Fail-proof content approaches to maximize your SEO success:

1. Create content that is relevant to today’s trends:

Start by expanding the content of your site to a keyword popular among the users. Keyword ranking is a holy grail among websites. Tools like SEMRush and Google Search Console are great ways to check whether your keyword rankings is dropping over time. To avoid this kind of problem, research recent trends in the market that are relevant to your keywords. Then, introduce and write innovative concepts about it. Create content that is superior to your competitors and set the standard.

Optimizing content to keywords requires methods that are too complex for beginners. If you are just starting out, remember that a slight fluctuation of your keyword ranking is definitely normal, unless it is a constant downward trend. Try to create new content if it comes to this. Remember that there are endless methods when writing content, just be sure to choose the right ones.

2. Write long-form content:

Long-form content refers to articles with 1,200 words or longer. A study conducted by QuickSprout showed that the average content length of the top 10 results of search queries is over 2,000 words. Long-form content is valuable to search engines. It gives you the ability to add as many keywords as you want throughout the content. Also everything that a user needs to know is already written within it. There is no need to go to other sites and find the missing information. Basically, users want to read content that is all-encompassing. This is why Google prioritizes website with long-form content because they are more informative and comprehensive.

3. Add high quality images and videos:

To make your content more attractive, insert novel and interesting images and videos. Visitors love websites that are lively. This boils down to the simple psychology of visual content. Be mindful that visual content has never failed marketers because at least 65% of people are “visual learners”. In fact, visual content is among the top marketing trends according to Twitter. It increases the desire of the users to read content and in turn increases your viewers time on the site. It is more persuasive and informative compared to black and white content. Try to experiment with visual contents to increase the popularity of your website.

Quality of Backlinks

Like bread and butter, SEO and backlinks compliment each other. In fact, backlink is one of the top ranking factors according to Backlinko. Backlinks are important to SEO. Google gives more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks. Google considers those sites more relevant than others on search engine result pages (SERPs). In turn, customers can find your website, resulting in an increase of traffic. Be sure to do regular check-ups on your website’s backlinks as this determines whether your SEO game plan is working or futile.

Acquiring links from low quality websites can hurt your ranking. It may lead to getting your website penalized by Google. Improve your link building campaign by paying attention to spammy sites. By doing this, you can conclude whether your SEO efforts are working or falling behind.

For instance, one goal of SEO is to increase the number of high quality backlinks to your website. If you see a surge of quality backlinks, your SEO strategies are working properly. If you also see a number of organic keywords increasing, it’s safe to presume that you’re targeting the right keywords and using them successfully in your content.

Ways to improve the quality of your backlinks:

1. Clean your backlink profile:

Websites that have made the mistake of buying bad backlinks from PBN services can lose almost all of their rankings. For this reason, cleaning up your backlink profile is crucial to your SEO. It may take time but this contributes to a significant impact on your website.

The first step is to use an online platform that helps clean-up backlink profiles. You can use Moz Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO. Through these tools, you can see low-quality links that could be negatively affecting your rankings.

In addition, be sure to check on the domain authority (DA), page authority (PA) and your website itself. Make an evaluation of the quality of every link and check for dead links. Make a list of those backlinks from sites with high authority scores, and those websites that are completely unrelated to your page. Double check or scrutinize their quality because you do not want to eliminate all backlinks. It is important to keep backlinks with good quality since they drive traffic to your website. After determining poor-quality backlinks, disavow or remove them.

2. Use backlink analysis tools:

Manually disavowing bad backlinks is a lengthy process. It takes various steps and therefore time. By using backlink analysis tools, you can speed this process up. Although manual work is still important, tools are helpful in maintaining quality links for your site. The following tools can help you monitor and examine your backlinks.

• Monitor Backlinks - A backlink checker for speedy and efficient disavowing of bad links. You can also use it to see how your backlinks influence your keyword position and the traffic acquired from Google.

• Link Research Tools - An exceptional backlink checker that has 25 link data sources and up to 97 metrics. LRT accurately cleans, recrawls, and verifies all of your link data in the most comprehensive manner.

• WebCEO - A Hummingbird-friendly link-removal tool that will help you scrutinize and rate your links. It can easily discover toxic links that may result in a Google Penguin penalty.

• Ahrefs - Monitors the growth and decline of your backlink profiles. Ahrefs backlink tool gives you a detailed backlink report of your website pages. They also offer videos that discuss the whole process which is somehow convenient and informative.

All the aforementioned sites offer a free trial. Although there is a subscription, they make it more efficient and quick to analyze your backlinks, purge them, and maintain a quality and high backlink profile without much effort.

According to experts; the need of a solid marketing plan has sent businesses after vanity metrics that look good but not enough. For this reason, hiring a professional SEO service provider can help you launch SEO strategies that are guaranteed to work. A digital partner will tell you what SEO strategy is failing and factors that can help your SEO success. Focusing on the right strategies means your maximizing your SEO opportunities. You’ll need to adjust your approaches because keeping things the same only breeds stagnant results.