The Art of SEO

Assessing Historical Progress

Measuring the results of SEO changes can be challenging, partly because there are so many moving parts and partly because months can elapse between when changes are made to a site and when results are seen in search rankings and traffic. This difficulty only increases the importance of measuring progress and being accountable for results. This section will explore methods for measuring the results from your SEO efforts.

Maintain a Timeline of Site Changes

Keeping a log of changes to your site is highly recommended. If you’re not keeping a timeline (which could be as simple as an online spreadsheet or as complex as a professional project management visual flowchart), you will have a harder time executing your SEO plan. Sure, without one you can still gauge the immediate effects of content additions/revisions, link acquisitions, and development changes, but there’s obscured visibility into what technical modifications to the website might have altered the course of search traffic, either positively or negatively.

If you can’t map changes, both those intended to influence SEO and those for which SEO wasn’t even a consideration, you’ll be optimizing blind and could miss powerful signals that could help dictate your strategy going forward. There are also many scenarios in which you will want to try to establish cause and effect, such as:

If search traffic spikes or plummets

Sudden changes in organic traffic are obviously notable events. If traffic plummets, you ...