@tjrobertson52

How do you know if your SDO campaign is working? A lot of people's first intuition Is going to be keyword ranking. However, rank tracking is unreliable.

Take this example where A or F is showing that their traffic Is down based on ranking data, Even though I know it to be up. In fact, you should only rely on keyword ranking data When you don't have access to search traffic data. The best source for search traffic data is Google Search Console.

It's completely free to set up. It'll walk you to this types of connecting it And it's data straight from Google. It'll show you how many times you actually showed up For a given keyword and how many of those times Someone clicked through to your website And what page they landed on.

So if search traffic is going up, The SDO campaign is working, right? Not quite. A fear of business, what you really care about is sales.

Let's take this window tinting shop, for example. jit. Now, blog posts are great.

We write them for all of our clients. But the truth is, very little of the traffic Going to your blog posts are going to turn into actual sales. And that's because Google doesn't rank blog posts For what are called transactional queries.

Blog posts rank well for informational queries When people are looking for information. A transactional query would be something Like window tinting near me. For these kind of queries, Google shows businesses.

And this is going to be Google business profiles, Home pages, and service pages. Or for e-commerce businesses, product, and category pages. For most businesses, you would rather have one visit To one of these transactional pages Than a thousand visits to your blog.

If there are some exceptions, some blog posts Do convert much better than others. But for the most part, this to these transactional pages Are what you really care about. So how do you isolate the traffic to your transactional pages?

We're going to use Regic. Now, don't worry. It sounds scary, but I made a tool, and it's super easy.

You're just going to pull up this advanced URL To GSC Regic's tool. In the exact URLs, you're going to paste the URL To each of your transactional pages. This is going to be your home page, the page Google Business Profile links to each Of your service pages or product and category pages.

You can put in the exact URLs, or if your site follows A domain structure that has the same subfolder For all of your service pages or product pages, Like it would on Shopify, you could just put something like product Right here in URLs that contain. For this client, we want any URL that contains their Google Business profile tracking parameter or slash services. Go ahead and hit generate regx, and then you'll just Copy this regx string.

Back in Google Search Console, you'll just hit this new button Here to add a page filter. You'll choose custom regx. Make sure it says matches regx.

Enter that here and hit apply. And now we're looking at just transactional pages. However, if we look at queries, we can see That a lot of these still have the company's name in it.

Now, why does that matter? Branded searches have nothing to do with SEO. If you're not ranking number one for your own brand, That's not an SEO problem.

That's a website problem. When we're trying to measure the effectiveness Of your SEO campaign, we want to ignore All branded search traffic. To do that, hit this new button, add a query filter.

We're going to go again to custom regx. And then we're going to enter in every word that Is in your brand name that we're confident would not Be in a non-branding search. For most companies, this is pretty easy, Although there are some rare ones where your brand name Is your product name, and it can be almost impossible To sort this out.

For this company, their brand terms Are always going to use the word elite. And it shouldn't take out any of their non-branded terms, Because it's not a word you would typically use when Looking for the service. If there were common acronyms or misspellings, You could add a pipe here and add them each, And you can do as many as you want.

Just make sure none of them would block non-branded terms. And in this time, we're going to set this To doesn't match regx and hit apply. Now we can see all the transactional search traffic Going to this website for non-branded terms.

These are people who are looking specifically For the services they offer, but they aren't looking Specifically for the business, so this is all SEO traffic. But of course, the only way to know How effective the SEO campaign has been Is to compare it to a previous date. So let's go ahead to this date right here, go to compare, And we're actually going to compare The last three months year over year.

And the reason we're doing year over year Is to account for seasonality. Like many businesses, parts of the year Are more busy than others. And if we compare it to the last three months, We won't know if it's seasonality Or actual ranking changes.

Go ahead and hit apply. Now with some quick math, we can see That their overall SEO traffic has gone up By 41% since last year. And we can see which queries it's gone up for the most.

Window tinting near me is the clear winner. We can see which pages have improved the most. And this is the SEO data that you really care about.

This is how you know your SEO campaign is working.