If you’re hiring an SEO agency, or have the time and knowledge to optimize your site in house, here are some tell tale sighs it’s working. SEO is very much a long term strategy so you’ll expect to see long term results, though there are some short term results which will tell you if you’re likely to prevail.
20 Indications That Your SEO Efforts Are Working Out (or not)
Short Term
1. Links to homepage – As your highest authority page, you’d expect to drive much of the new link building to this page.
2. Links to entire domain – Smart link building will spread over various target pages so you’ll expect to see an overall uplift in the total in bound links pointing to the domain.
3. Number of pages indexed (Google) – Chances are that before the SEO work began, some pages where missing from the index or hidden under the dreaded supplement results.
4. Number of pages indexed (Yahoo) – Same as above, you’d expect to see an uplift in indexed pages.
5. Number of content duplication pages – Once metadata (and maybe some smart 301 / canonical tag work) you’d expect to see less duplicate content issues.
6. Number of pages missing metadata – Each page should have targeted metadata.
7. Number of content pages (ex about us, privacy policy etc) – Intelligent SEO is always about making more great content available on your site, so any decent SEO effort should include the creation of fresh new content which is optimized around your goals.
8. Intervals between Google’s page crawl (in days) – After cleaning some of your HTML code and introducing new content regularly, you’d expect to see an increase in crawl rate which means that your new content will get indexed quicker.
9. Outbound links – Important for SEO, you’ll need to link to added value industry authoritative resources.
Long Term
10. [Keyword 1] rank – You’d expect to see your site ranking higher for these competitive terms.
- [Keyword 2] rank – As above.
- Etc…
11. Traffic from image search (in unique visitors) – After optimizing your images in terms of alt text, image name, size etc you should be getting some image love from the engines. Not great for increasing revenue, but an indication that you’re on the right course.
12. Homepage Page Rank – More authority links, smart use of nofollow, redirect etc and page rank should increase.
13. Number of pages with Page Rank - You’d expect due to the homepage page rank increase to see more pages with page rank.
14. Number of pages getting traffic from the search engines – More of your site pages should be getting traffic from the engines (look for landing pages in Google Analytics).
15. Overall uplift in traffic (in %) - The goal of your search engine optimisation work should include increasing overall traffic.
16. Uplift in traffic from search engines – Mainly due to increase ranking of established pages, you should see an increase of organic traffic.
17. Uplift in traffic from social networking sites – If you’ve created great shareable content and used one of the social bookmarking smartly, you should see an increase in social traffic.
18. Total .edu links to domain – Getting links is very much where they come from so you’d expect some high authority links
19. Total .gov links to domain – As above
20. Uplift in sales (in %) - The holey grail 
Try to take a snapshot of each indication at the start, mid way and end of the campaign to compare results and optimize your efforts further.
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