After you SEO optimize your website, you will want to know what parts of the program are working well and what still needs improvement. Furthermore, you’ll need a way to quantify the business impact of your SEO work.

To get a good understanding of the effectiveness of your SEO program, you’ll need to understand how your keyword visibility has changed over time, how much traffic that visibility is driving to the website, and what is happening to that traffic.

There are many tools that will give you data on keyword visibility. Tools such as Hubspot’s Marketing Grader, Keyword Spy or SEM Rush can quickly tell you how visible your keywords are. If you keep track of your results from month to month, you’ll be able to see the impact of your work on visibility over time.

Keyword visibility, of course, is only the first step in the process. What you really want to know is how your visibility is impacting traffic and leads or sales. To get this data you’ll need to use a website analytics program like Google Analytics. This tool will tell you how much traffic and how many goal conversions you get from each keyword. By tying your visibility to traffic to conversions, you can get a complete picture of the business impact of your SEO work. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”