After a massive digital marketing push, especially with SEO involved, you're naturally going to want to check and see if your hard-won efforts will pay off. Well, aside from playing the waiting game for a bit, there are a few ways to see if that SEO specialist you had hired delivered on goals and promises.

How Long Does It Take To See SEO Efforts?

In short, how long it takes to see an SEO impact varies. We know that's not the best answer, but it's true. SEO has a lot of moving pieces and factors determining its success. Things like keyword difficulty, proper keyword implementation, and your particular business and its place in the industry.

For example, a Fortune 500 company will simply have a better chance of dominating specific high-volume keywords in its industry.

So, the talents of a search engine optimization specialist could have your results appearing within three to six months. Again, it all depends on numerous variables.

Did Your SEO Specialist Do A Good Job? Measuring Success

Aside from seeing concrete SEO results after a lengthy digital marketing campaign, there are a few key ways to measure an SEO campaign's success. Let's look at a few and see if your SEO expert has a good head on their shoulders. Plus, it's a great way to know if they committed any serious SEO mistakes.

Impressions

Simply put, you want people to visit your website. What you want potential customers to do once they get to your page is another thing.

If you intend to drive up web traffic to set the foundations toward building leads, you need to measure impressions.

An impression is when an Internet user sees your content. It could be your website, blog, or any other piece of content. Impressions are a great way to see if your SEO expert did a good job.

An SEO specialist will keep this in mind when performing keyword research. For example, SEO experts can focus on high volume, low difficulty keywords to implement based on your strategy. When the broad match went away, the phrase match earned a big boost—as such, switching to phrase match can open up more keyword opportunities.

If the SEO expert did a decent job, you should see impressions improve, depending on the page and content.

Website Rankings

Are people funneling towards your website? A great way to see if your SEO specialist did a decent job is to see if your site is ranking well. After all, your SEO expert is helping your business with search engine optimization. What better metric to measure success?

In short, if your site is all of a sudden on the top ten in Google SERPs, chances are your SEO is solid. However, as we mentioned before, this can take some time.

Especially with other companies vying for the best SEO strategies.

Conversions

A good marketing initiative, complete with SEO efforts, is only as good as its conversions.

Impressions are great. Exposure to your company and brand is a promising start towards building a customer base and web presence. But you eventually want customers to make the jump and finally engage with your company.

Conversions are actions that you want visitors to take. Do you want them to click on a specific link? Maybe put an item in their shopping cart, making their way down the marketing funnel? Your idea of a conversion depends on your strategies, as well as your SEO research and implementation.

With content marketing, advertising efforts attempt to guide the potential customer into the marketing funnel. This figurative measurement takes the visitor from mere brand awareness to a satisfied customer.

Are you experiencing conversions on your website?

Backlinks

For these examples, we'll be using our favorite SEO tool, Ahrefs. Look at this backlink profile. It has a massive amount of backlinks, improving its credibility on Google.

Think of backlinks as endorsements for your company from other websites. Having numerous backlinks from multiple reputable websites. Google sees this as a great thing, and it's a winning SEO strategy in marketing.

As such, your increase in the number of backlinks is a reliable way to measure search engine optimization success rates.

Working With An SEO Specialist

When you're looking for an SEO specialist, it's essential to consider a few aspects. Here are some crucial qualities and skills to look for when trying to grow your brand with SEO.

SEO specialists the world over, take note! You need these SEO skills to attract and work with clients throughout your career.

• Experience - Does the potential SEO employee have an acceptable amount of SEO experience? Anyone can plug keywords into sentences and insist on using popular keywords. An accomplished SEO expert will understand bigger picture ideas in SEO and can give advice, digital marketing strategies, and more.
• Communication Skills - When developing marketing strategies and content, an SEO specialist is an excellent asset to any business. As such, an SEO specialist should be willing and able to communicate with the client. This means answering questions, strategically planning new and exciting online marketing plans, and more. If you're not hearing from your SEO specialist on a regular or agreed-upon basis, something needs to improve. Otherwise, your content sure won't.
• Ability to Improve - Search engine optimization is an ever-changing thing. This means an SEO expert needs to update and optimize content for relevance and accuracy. Never rest on your SEO laurels.

Conclusion: Putting Your SEO Into Perspective

It's well worth your time to use digital marketing consultants to see what marketing initiatives your company needs. Additionally, you must start working with an SEO expert that dedicates time and effort towards the best SEO practices and strategies.

Remember: SEO is an ongoing and ever-changing aspect of content marketing. Whether it's Google updates or other companies stepping up their efforts, you need to keep your eye on the ball. A great way to ensure success is hiring an SEO expert and seeing if they did a good job.