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How do you know that your SEO efforts are effective?
One important note before we dive in: Early-stage startups can’t do SEO the same way that mature companies do. But still, if they target wide audiences (DevOps SaaS for instance) they must tap into SEO as soon as possible.
Below are a few out-of-box pointers, specifically for early-stage B2B startups:, to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
1. The most intuitive thought is to check the average rank, but when you just start running SEO, for a new startup, you first need to be actually ranked on target keywords. Therefore you should be looking at the impressions that you are getting per keyword and monitor for progress. For instance, the image below (purple- impressions, orange- position) shows a drop in the average rank (position) but that’s just as we are now ranked on many more queries (which wasn’t the case before we started).
2. Technical SEO is critical to kickoff the climbing in ranks (mainly internal links, orphaned pages, duplicated content and other forms of errors)
3. Filter specific countries so you can see how you progress in your target countries – you will need a dedicated backlink strategy for the counties of focus.
4. Filter out (exclude) queries that are not related to you (for instance, generic queries that are in your brand name) – you want to measure the progress on target keywords
5. Double-check the data with tools like SEMrush , but don’t take what they say at face value, they are VERY inaccurate.
6. Check the “pages tab” in search console. You will see the most popular pages like in Google Analytics, but here you can also see the rank and the keywords that rank this page. You will also e able to drill down to get insights by country.
7. A spike in organic traffic can be allocated to ‘Google Discover’. You can see this in the Search Console reports as well. You can see the content that was featured and the countries in which it appeared.
8. Use the search console tool to drill down to focus keywords, and see the progress per keyword + per country + the page that “does the job” – you may want to continue pushing that page, updating the content and adding more backlinks related to target countries.
9. Expect to see fluctuations. it’s like the stock exchange – the long term trend is what’s important
Einav Laviv is a tech and startup marketing exec. with 20 years of experience, and a Co-Founder at G2Mteam, which supports Israeli startups with full-stack global marketing services since 2014. She lives, breathes, and loves deep tech & data driven marketing
