Everything About Tracking SEO Results And How To Do It Right
Search engine optimization works 99% of the time, but to actually see the results, you need to track its performance.
Tracking SEO results is not necessarily easy, but we’ll make it as simple as possible to understand below…
What Is SEO Tracking For Remodelers
SEO tracking means analyzing data from your website to get insights into what drives the performance of your website up (and what drags it down, too).
Naturally, to understand this performance, you’ll have to determine the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you’re most interested in.
For a remodeler or a contractor, some good KPIs would be:
- Forms submitted from your website
- A growth in clicks and impressions
- Phone calls from your Google Business Profile
- Phone calls from your website
- Local rankings in the Google Map Pack (the top 3 local businesses)
- Your average position in the Google Search Results
- And even an increase in your social media activity (likes, shares, follows)
How To Find If Your SEO For Remodelers Is Working
Now you know what it means to track SEO and you have the KPIs that are worth tracking. Let’s see how you know if your SEO actually works.
We have a different article that tackles this topic. You can read it here.
But in a nutshell, your SEO for remodelers is working if you’re seeing a continuous increase in clicks, quote requests, and phone calls.
The Most Important KPIs For Tracking Your SEO For Remodelers
#1. Forms Submitted From Your Website
Whenever you receive a quote from your website, that means you have a qualified lead.
Here’s how we know that lead is qualified…
Who else would browse your entire website and fill out a form with their personal information if they weren’t interested in working with you?
How to track?
We give all of our clients their own tool for tracking forms submitted from their sites. They get all the relevant details that will make selling to that particular lead so much easier.
#2. Phone Calls From The Google Business Profile & Website
Phone calls are also great, maybe even better than forms submitted.
You can easily track phone calls from your Google Business Profile in the “performance” tab. You’ll also see here the clicks to your website, the number of messages you received on Google, and more.
How to track?
Tracking the phone calls on your website is a little trickier because you’ll need to set a Google Tag to count the action as an “event”. You’d create a tag that would only fire when someone clicks on the phone number on your site.
To take this even further, you can get CallRail for your website to record phone conversations with your leads and see where each call came from.
#3. Local Search Rankings
The local search rankings are a huge factor that sort of dictates all other KPIs.
For example, if you rank on the #1 spot when someone searches for “kitchen remodeler near me,” you’ll definitely get more phone calls, website clicks, and quote requests.
The only problem is that you can only track local search rankings with a paid tool.
How to track?
We use Brightlocal to show our clients their local search rankings, but there are a few other tools that do this just as well.
#4. Average Position In The Google Searches
The average position on Google’s organic results is dictated by the number of keywords your website ranks for.
At the same time, you don’t want to be ranking for irrelevant keywords, so you need to focus on the ones important to your business.
If you’re a kitchen remodeler, you’ll want to rank for keywords like kitchen remodeling, kitchen contractor, kitchen makeover, kitchen cabinet installation, kitchen floors, etc.
Every keyword related to kitchens and remodeling will help, but one about landscaping won’t have any value.
How to track?
You can track the average position in the search results based on specific keywords in Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and other SEO tracking tools.
#5. Track Organic Traffic With Clicks & Impressions
Organic traffic refers to the visitors who enter your website after they perform a Google search.
If, for example, they search for “kitchen remodels” and click on any result that leads to your site, that’s considered organic traffic. Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic.
How to track?
The easiest way to track clicks and impressions is on Google Search Console. All you need to do is choose a timeframe and see if the clicks & impressions increased, stayed the same, or decreased.
- Clicks - will count every instance of when a user clicks on your website’s pages on Google.
- Impressions - will count every instance of when a specific page on your website was shown to a user.
It’s important to understand that fluctuations in these KPIs are natural. From an SEO standpoint, every month can look different mostly because of the seasonality or because the competition is doing more.
Top 4 Tools To Track SEO
Just like you can’t paint without a sprayer, you can’t track SEO without a tracking tool. Here are 4 of our top choices:
Google Search Console (or GSC) is a free tool from Google. Its interface is friendly, the data is clear and simple, and the information is always up to date.
The only thing that you need to remember is that GSC only shows the results from Google searches, so it won’t show visitors that came from Facebook, Instagram, or Yelp.
Google Search Console’s simplicity makes it a perfect tool for beginners to track how your SEO efforts impact your construction business.
Google Analytics is the bigger brother of GSC. It’s a complete version that tracks everything.
This is also a free tool that you can get by just installing a certain code on your website or by using a third-party tool that connects your website to your Google Analytics account.
With its complexity and in-depth analysis comes the biggest downside: It’s more difficult to use and read the data, especially if marketing is not your cup of tea.
Ahrefs is a paid tool that shows not only your website’s SEO performance but also how Google sees other websites, like your competitors’.
Again, this is a very comprehensive tool that requires a lot of practice to master and make the most of it. If you’re not planning to get into marketing, we suggest sticking with the free options.
Brightlocal is an SEO tracking tool as well, but for local SEO. Tracking your local SEO will show you how you rank locally in the county or cities you offer your remodeling services.
Local SEO is very closely connected with your Google Business Profile as well. That’s your business profile on Google, and you want it to show first whenever someone searches for “kitchen remodelers near me”.
Start Tracking Your SEO Results And Make Sure Your Investment Is Profitable
We’re not saying not to trust your agency, but knowing how to read some of the data yourself means you’ll be able to understand your investment better.
Truth be told, we’ve seen agencies brag about stellar results when in fact the story was a lot sadder.
We give all of our clients a breakdown of how each month goes. Everything is out in plain sight, even if the rankings decrease. With thorough research, we’ll make sure your SEO pays off. You can check out our case studies to see for yourself!
If you don’t feel like learning how to read and track data, you can get in touch with us, and we’ll give you an audit and see how your SEO has been performing for the last couple of months!