Are you paying for failing SEO that’s dressed up as success?

One of the issues with SEO is that it can be hard to define what success looks like.

If a company is working on your site and manages to raise your average position from 45 to 24, technically speaking, they have done their job as your rankings have improved.

Still, on the other hand, they’ve not increased your rankings to the point where they will bring you new business enquiries.

This is why it’s important to set clear expectations about success at the start of any SEO project.

Without these in place, you won’t have any benchmarks against which to measure your SEO work, and it can leave clients wondering what they are paying for.

1. Setting expectations for your SEO project
2. What does SEO success look like for your WordPress site?
   1. With SEO, success can come incrementally
3. Using data to justify SEO spending over longer periods
   1. Traffic volume over quality
   2. Session duration and page views per session
   3. Bounce rate drop-offs on low-value pages
   4. New versus returning visitors
   5. Event tracking and interaction rates
   6. High source/medium diversity
4. You can have to ask the right questions rather than be presented with meaningful reports
5. Develop a method of knowing where your leads come from

Setting expectations for your SEO project.

Depending on the state of your current SEO, you may have to invest some money in going back to the basics and correcting the foundations.

Just like a house built without solid foundations will fall, your site’s SEO will fail if you have not optimised your site properly to be ready for SEO.

What does SEO success look like for your WordPress site?

Well, obviously, the point of SEO is to get you ranking for important keywords and to ensure your site converts new visitors into leads—after this, it’s down to your own conversion rates.

With SEO, success can come incrementally.

Just like you can’t run before you can walk, your site can’t rank until the SEO foundations are solid, and this can mean several months of work where you only see small improvements to your rankings,

Technical SEO and on-page SEO work will start, but the results will be slow to start with—you may see keywords move from position 200+ to position 50, still way outside the top ten, but nevertheless an improvement.

This is great work by your WordPress SEO—the rankings are going in the right direction. Now, what is needed is consistency in your content production, article improvements, and some off-page SEO to get higher ranking positions.

This sort of stuff is fine, provided it was communicated to you first that this would happen.

Problems occur when your SEO seems to be doing nothing for your business despite your SEO expert telling you that everything is great.

Using data to justify SEO spending over longer periods.

Personally, I am not a fan of Google Analytics. GA4 is not as useless as a chocolate teapot, but some SEOs still use it to provide you with reports as it’s free, and they are too tin-pot to invest in paid SEO tools that the pros use.

Here are real-world examples to show how GA4 data can be used, in part, to try and justify poor SEO on your WordPress site.

Traffic volume over quality.

This is common; not all traffic is valuable to your business. If your agency is telling you they have increased your traffic, that’s great, but it’s got to be the right kind of traffic.

An example of this is when an SEO posts content that will rank for a niche term that is simply not relevant to your business.

This is done because it’s easier to get a page ranking for a high-volume, low-competitive term, but all this does is bring you visitors who bounce back to the search results.

Your service is irrelevant to the search terms, but people see it in the search, click the link, and then bounce as there is nothing you offer that is of value to them.

In GA4, this can result in a report that shows you have 2x times the traffic you used to have, but you know, as the business owner, that this is not resulting in new business leads.

Session duration and page views per session.

Whilst the longer a visitor spends on your page is a positive metric, if this increased dwell time does not result in a conversion, it’s failure dressed as success.

Higher dwell times can signal poor UX or difficulty finding what the user is looking for.

It’s not difficult to argue that this could be seen as ‘increased engagement’, but if it is not improving your bottom line, it’s not working.

Bounce rate drop-offs on low-value pages.

Another report that’s easy to run and confusing. If your site experiences a reduction in bounce rates, this can be used as a success metric, but only if the reductions are on the right pages.

This metric becomes irrelevant if bounce rates have been reduced on pages that never converted.

New versus returning visitors.

Some SEOs might try to leverage returning visitor numbers as a success metric, but again, it’s superficial if they are not converting or are the wrong type of traffic.

It simply results in more visits without value to your website and does nothing to increase your sales.

Event tracking and interaction rates.

These show increases in tracked events in GA4 – button clicks, etc.

Micro-events, such as page scrolls and button hovers, can be included in these reports to make them look more impressive than they are.

Again, if these metrics do not convert into a new business, they hold zero value.

High source/medium diversity.

This is where you see increased traffic from multiple sources (think social, referrals, organic, etc).

Your SEO may claim that this increase in traffic is a success, such as a bump in referral traffic from low-quality sites or irrelevant social sources to make your site appear more popular. Again, this can inflate the numbers while delivering no real value to your business.