Hi, and welcome back to the simple SEO podcast. I am your host, Rachel Lindteigen and today I want to dive into a question that I get regularly. When I do the free training classes. And that is how do I know if my SEO is working? So if you've been trying to follow along and learn SEO, and you're trying to implement what you're learning here on the podcast. On your website, you may be starting to wonder the same thing. Like how do I know if what I'm doing is working? What do I check? So let's talk about it. What you're going to want to do is to watch for a couple of different metrics. So you're going to need to be reporting on a few things in order to really understand, is this working. The first thing I want you to look at. Would be the keyword ranking for the pages that your doing SEO on. So you probably have not yet done SEO or search engine optimization on every page on your website or every blog post. You've probably started working on some from a priority standpoint. Maybe you've optimized just your website or you've just started. Optimizing the new blog posts as you create them. And you're waiting to see how it all works. So you're trying, you're doing SEO. But you're not quite sure. So the first thing you're going to do. Is to take a list of those keywords that you have used in your optimization. So they were in your title, tags, they were in your meta descriptions. You put them in your file names, your URLs, you won't copy. That was all about that key word. I want you to take those. If you're using a keyword reporting tool, keyword ranking tool. I want you to make sure you've added them to the tools so that it tracks your rankings over time. So you can start to see if you go up or down. If you've not done that yet. You can go to Google, open an incognito browser window. That's one, that's going to have less personalized results. You do not want to search for yourself and do your keyword verification in your regular Chrome browser window because we get personalized results in. You're going to show up higher in your personal results than somebody who's not been to your website before. So make sure you're using an incognito browser window. What you're going to want to do is put that keyword in the search bar and see, where do you show up? Are you in positions? One, two or three. Are you in four through 10? Are you on page two, page three, page four. And I want you to track that. About once a month and we look at it no more than every other week. You'll start to drive yourself nuts. Cause Google's kind of fickle. They'll test things. They'll move you up. They'll move you down. They'll move you around. What we want to do is just look on an average over the course of a month, where do I end up? So at the end of each month, the beginning of the new month, go ahead and check your keyword rankings and just see. If your SEO is working. Your keyword rankings for those pages that you've worked on. Those, those keywords that you've optimized for you should be getting smaller, meaning you should be getting closer and closer to position number one, because that's where you're going to start getting more traffic. So that's the first thing is keyword rankings are my keywords ranking higher meaning are they getting a smaller number? In Google search results. The next thing we want to look at is the organic traffic. To the page that you have optimized where you used that key word. So to do this, you're going to go into your Google analytics account. And you're going to go into your pages and screens report, and you're going to look and see. Which blog posts or which pages are getting traffic. Now, you're going to have to do an overlay to be able to see your traffic by channel, to see organic versus direct versus social versus email, et cetera. If you're not sure how to do this, just join me in simple SEO content. There's a whole module that walks you through. How to do this and to understand what the data in analytics says so that you can figure out for sure. If what you're doing is working because the answers to all your questions are pretty much in your analytics program. If you know where to look for them. So you're going to want to look and see of the pages that you've optimized. So those pages that you specifically did your SEO on. Are you getting more organic traffic to those pages? The other thing you can look at is the engagement. How engaged are people, what is the averaging gauge meant time on those pages? Because your engagement metrics are really important to Google. They are going to impact your rankings. So if you have this big, long blog post and you've spent lots of time writing it, but your average engagement is like, 10 seconds. People don't like that post. And so there's something going on with that one and you're probably not going to have it work really well, meaning Google's probably not going to rank it higher and you're probably not going to get a lot of traffic to it. So definitely keep an eye on your engagement time on each post that you're optimizing for, just to kind of understand a little more. Now. As you move on and you're looking like each month and you want to understand what you're looking for and how you interpret the results. What you're going to want to look at in your keyword ranking report will be how many keywords do you have that are ranking in positions? One, two or three. These are the most important because the keywords in positions one, two, and three are the ones that are going to get the majority of the traffic from Google search. Then you're going to want to look at four through 10. These are the additional keywords that are on page one. You're going to get more traffic for like position four, then you will get for position 10. That's okay. Just having them on page one is a good thing because you've got more visibility. Then we're going to want to look for the overall movement in your keyword rankings. Are you in general, going up or down is the new content that you're creating, getting more traffic or less traffic? Are people engaging with it because that's really gonna make a big difference to how your SEO. Program performs overall. And is your SEO working? And then the other thing you can look at is your overall website traffic. You want to look at your total traffic to your website. You also want to look at your SEO traffic. What percent of your traffic is coming from Google each month? Ideally, if you're doing SEO, we would like to see an increase month over month, over month. I want to see more traffic from SEO. Each month and I definitely want to see. Up traffic growth pattern year over year. So if you're not sure how to figure all of this out again, I'm going to tell you, just join me in class because not only my name teach you what all this means. I'm actually going to give you the templates that you use, that you just have to plug your numbers in and they do all the math for you because I know. Like calculating the percent increase or percent decrease in the month over month change in the year, over year, change in like all of that. Is exhausting. I still have to sometimes walk myself through where I came from, where I'm going divided by this divided by that like, Just use the templates and the spreadsheets that I've put together for you to figure this out and be able to make sure that what you're doing from an SEO perspective is working. This is one of the things. And then I know people struggle with, which is why I wanted to talk about it on the podcast today. How do you know if your SEO is working? What you're looking for is, are your keyword numbers? Are your, your keyword numbers going up? Meaning are they getting smaller? Are you ranking higher? And then are you getting. More organic traffic to your website. And then very importantly, are you getting more organic traffic to the pages that you're optimizing for? Because that's something that you're going to want to look at to really understand. How all of this is working. And like I said, if you have questions, you're not sure how to figure any of this out. My friend just joined me in simple SEO content. Let's make sure that what you're doing is getting results because we can get you more traffic to your website for free, which will help you make more money in your business. Let me help you get found on Google. Let's get that traffic. Let's get that money coming in. Let's turn things around for your business. And really grow so that you're ready to scale. That's what I'm here to help you with. All right. If you have any questions, you know what to do, you can DM me on Instagram. You can join me in simple SEO content and learn how to do all of this in a super easy step-by-step manner, using all of my templates and spreadsheets. So you don't have to create them yourself because they're kind of a pain in the behind to create. Right. So that's why I do it for you. And let's get this SEO working for you, my friend. All right, I'll see you back here next week.