If someone asked you, how do you know if your SEO is working? Some people may reply “We’re ranking highly on Google” or “higher on Google”. Although your rankings on Google may technically mean your SEO is working, especially if your rankings are increasing for targetted search terms, this doesn’t necessarily be the correct terminology when you use the word ‘working’.
With any marketing campaigns, it’s only working if your goals are being met. So if your goal is to get to the top of Google for a specific search term, then awesome! But a lot of peoples end goals aren’t to rank highly on Google but to secure a return on investment. There are many ways this can be done and it all depends on knowing what search phrases to target, and why you’re targetting them.
For example, to increase brand awareness you may want to target a lot of long tail keywords, this will result in your website being seen for a lot of search terms for people trying to research a bit more about the sort of service industry you’re in. This will lead to a lot of traffic to your website, but probably not a lot of direct revenue from this traffic. This can later be turned into profit from simple consumer psychology, where you will be the first person people think of if they ever need to use the service that you offer. A good example of this would be:
Although this real estate company may not rank on the top of Google for ‘Real Estate Agencies in my area’. The viewer may go to type in their brand name directly, where they’re most likely going to rank first and that real estate company has a new client!
On the flip side, to increase website sales/conversions, you’ll want to target the search terms like ‘Real Estate Agencies in my area’. Search terms like these have a large share of traffic, and they’ve targetted search terms on people genuinely looking to buy property. Leading to a good chance of income!
The long story short of it is that just ranking highly on Google won’t always mean your campaign is working unless the search terms you’re targetting are fit for your purpose. Look at keyword research if you’re struggling with this.