That’s a great question. In fact, what is the number one question that you should continuously be asking yourself whenever you’re using an agency or even your internal team to perform your SEO campaigns?
We believe that what you don’t question you don’t improve.
That is why we created an eBook called the Top 50 Questions to Ask Your SEO Company. However, here are some of the highlights of what we believe you should consider:
Qualified traffic
Assuming your website is already connected to Google Analytics, you can monitor your traffic improvement. But just because traffic is improving does not exactly mean it’s qualified. Therefore, you should hope your manufacturing SEO company monitors not just the traffic that comes to your website, but how potential leads are engaging with your content.
We’ve been in many situations where we’ve been able to drive a lot of traffic to a client’s website, but the content just isn’t compelling enough to engage a potential audience, who quickly abandon their query. That’s what makes valuable content that solves a problem so vital to generating qualified leads.
Other things that you can do to monitor engagement is using heat-mapping analysis. This is part of something we call a usability conversion analysis which you can learn all about here.
Goal conversion
When you’re analyzing your traffic and how users are engaging with your website, another metric that you should be considering is goal conversion.
Whether your goal is to have users fill out a form, watch a video, or have significant scroll depth on your pages, goal conversion is critical to understanding if your SEO is driving value.
Keyword improvement

A KPI that is critical to your SEO is understanding your keyword improvement. As we mentioned above, keywords don’t magically land on the first page of Google overnight. Therefore, it’s important to keep a lot of irons in the fire, which means that we can’t pin all our hopes on one or two specific keywords, but rather optimizing for multiple keywords––sometimes hundreds or even thousands––in one campaign.
There are variety of keyword tools that you can use to monitor your keyword improvement/progress. Google Analytics, Hubspot, Ubersuggest, Google Search Console are just some of the most popular.
A healthy campaign should see critical keywords going from deeper search engine results to pages closer to page one. When your team is monitoring these keywords effectively, you’ll be able to optimize and re-optimize content to keep steady progress.
ROI
Like anything, SEO is an investment. But many companies struggle to prove ROI on their marketing. If you set up your goal tracking effectively, you can measure the dollar value of your KPIs and goals versus your initial expenditure or investment. Your SEO team should be able to provide these metrics to you on a regular basis. If they can’t, you may want to find an agency that uses analytics to drive ROI.