Realistic SEO goals

- A common question people have is, how do I measure whether my SEO is working, and how do I benchmark myself against other sites? And, there's no easy answer for that. I can't tell you that 20% of your traffic should come from SEO, or 30% of your traffic should come from SEO. I can tell you that if 90% of your traffic is coming from SEO, it's probably too much. Because then you're in danger that you're getting too much off a search and you haven't diversified. But, the metrics you should be looking for is that your SEO-related traffic ought to be increasing month over month.

And it's the traffic you should be looking at, not keyword rankings. You shouldn't be picking out three keywords and looking to see whether you're in the top 10, and monitoring that every day or every week. Because that might not be how your audience is searching for you, first of all. Now secondly, your audience is searching for you in many many ways, beyond those many terms. So, when you look at your overall traffic, that's giving you a truer sense of whether or not your SEO efforts are working. And, if you're seeing that month over month, your traffic is starting to rise, even if it's rising a little bit, you're on the right track.

If it's rising significantly, then maybe you're doing an even better job than you should, and you can look at that also, independently of your other traffic, so that maybe your percentage of SEO is dropping, but the raw amount of traffic that you're getting off a search is increasing because you just have more traffic coming from other sources. That's something you need to keep in mind in it as well.