Improving search engine optimization efforts across the web for your brand is crucial to long-term performance. We’ve covered six key elements this week that must be followed as part of a broader SEO effort, but there are countless others that make for good practice in any day-to-day management process. While the nature of SEO continues to change, the fundamentals of the process do not. As such, we’ve been in pursuit of sound pieces of advice that relate to the core functions of SEO and that will remain relevant now and into the future. In our third and final installment today, we’ll be providing you with three more quick ways to monitor SEO campaign success and detect any changes.

Build Links in Relevant Places

There are many different reasons why building links on other websites is an important part of SEO. In years past, link building was one of the most important elements you could engage in in order to ensure overall visibility in search engines. While the practice is less direct in its effects today, building links on relevant niche and community sites can help improve overall organic traffic and bolster SEO results simultaneously. There are many different tools and utilities available that can be used to see how well you’re pinging links and earning links from other websites and on social media. In order to gain more traction in search engines while also driving traffic at the same time, it is absolutely necessary that you monitor link building efforts on a regular basis.

Inspect Conversions and Engagements

On social media, many people monitor a variety of interactions through built-in control panels and data solutions. The number of likes, shares, clicks, comments and so forth can be instrumental in determining whether a given approach is working or not. When it comes to SEO and how your website is or isn’t benefiting from it, it’s absolutely necessary to track every type of engagement and conversion. Once people arrive on your website, what are they doing from there? Being able to determine whether those who are arriving on your website through organic search traffic are engaging more or less than those brought there by digital marketing efforts will help you determine the effectiveness of your efforts. You can also compare the number of conversions and engagements through organic sources to see whether SEO is having a qualitative impact, as opposed to just a quantitative one.

Perform Brand Searches

How many mentions does your brand receive across social media and in other areas of search? An active social media presence may help to augment your brand’s reach, but these mentions can inevitably factor in to how much reach you obtain in search as well. Social media platforms such as Twitter now feature prominently in a variety of search results. Additionally, any SEO growth in search will naturally result in more brand mentions elsewhere, which results in pinging links back in many different SERPs. Tracking these changes on a weekly or monthly basis can help you determine how much benefit you’re generating from a comprehensive SEO effort, how many links you’re building and how many people are seeing your content (and sharing it) on social media.