5 Ways to Tell if SEO is Working

posted on March 10, 2009

Alright, so you’ve hired a SEO firm to do some work on your website. Or maybe you’re doing it yourself. Either way, how to do you know when SEO is working? This seems simple, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Statistics show growth

Probably the most obvious one here. If you see that you are getting more traffic from search engines, that shows that your SEO plan is working. This shouldn’t be your only indicator, though.
You are getting conversions, not just traffic

This point goes with #1. You can be getting traffic, but that doesn’t mean that it is working. Make sure that traffic is relevant and that your site is showing up for relevant keywords by checking your conversions. You should be making money, not just getting traffic.
You can hold ranks without using unethical techniques

I wouldn’t exactly call a black hat SEO plan a successful one. You want to be able to hold rankings for a long time – and continue benefiting from these rankings.
Things are moving on their own

I was mainly thinking about backlinks here. You don’t want to spend hours of time generating backlinks for your website – once your website starts to get traffic it should start to do things on it’s own.
You’re able to spend less time on SEO

This one basically sums up all of the other ones. You don’t want to spend more time on SEO – you want to spend it on your business or website. SEO should be a process (you spend a little time on it each day, week, whatever suits you), not something that you spend hours doing.