Your company will naturally feel and see the results of a well-designed SEO campaign through the increase in leads and social chatter.

Being able to quantify that feeling into visually compelling data instills trust and allows for greater flexibility with future campaigns.

Here’s how to measure SEO success with Google Data Studio.

Define Success

There needs to be a clear, measurable goal.

What defines SEO success for every company is going to differ however there are a few solid KPIs that most service based businesses focus on:

• Lead generation.
• Customer engagement.
• Brand visibility.

This article is going to focus on lead generation because ultimately that is what makes money.

Setting Up Goals

Lead Generation

Now that you have defined your content’s key performance indicators – or what you determine to be a success – we need to record those goal completions.

Our team prefers to use a combination of Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Data Studio to create interactive reports anyone can view at any time.

To measure lead generation, you must set up a custom goal for each successfully submitted form.

The most obvious method to collect data is a unique thank you page for a unique form fill.

Google Analytics does a great job explaining how to set up destination tracking in this documentation. 

Creating a New Goal in Google Analytics

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Click Admin.
3. Navigate to the desired View:
   • Should be filtering out company IPs here.
4. In the VIEW column, click Goals.
5. Click + NEW GOAL
6. Select Custom from the list of options.
7. Click Next Step.
8. Select the goal Type: Destination.
9. Destination: Equals to “/campaignname_thankyou”
   • Edit this to your campaign’s unique thank you page.
10. Value: Assign a monetary value for how much each lead is worth.
11. Click Save.

Google Tag Manager can be used to measure more complicated touchpoints, like call schedulers or when destination tracking is not possible.

Visualize the Data

Visualize the data with Google Data Studio, this is a free tool available by Google that is easy to use, customize and share.

Because we have laid out conversion tracking in the previous steps, we can now turn this hard data into an appealing interactive report that team members can access 24/7.

Making the hard-earned increase in organic brand visibility, user engagement, and/or leads generated easy to convey and understand.

This tip is going to stay focused on proving the ROI of an SEO campaign. So, lead generation. 

The full step-by-step guide including Brand Visibility and Organic Audience Engagement metrics is available in the full article posted on SEJ.

Bottom left table is where our previous work setting up goals (KPIs) in Google Analytics and assigning values comes into play.

The lead generation table displays:

• How many users are navigating to the new content pages.
• How many goals are completed per page.
• What the monetary value of that content campaign is.

Note: If this is not new content you will be notating the difference in goals and page/goal value after edits are made.

Lead Generation by Landing Page Table: This image uses Sample Data provided by Google to protect the privacy of our partners.

It gets even cooler when you start adding MCF assisted conversions to show which LPs have contributed to all conversions.

SEO Return on Investment

ROI for search engine optimization seems hard because value of edits and new campaigns can stretch over months and the leads generated continue long after.

I promise it’s a lot easier than you think. The key is to work with your client or partner to not only define goals but assign a value to that goal. 

As an SEO provider, your work should be organized with a planned strategy. Roll out your edits in bundles and measure the monetary effect.

Do not work through a “checklist” and throw darts at a wall until something sticks. Understand what will stick, know the probability and risk, before spending a client’s money.

Return on investment is calculated by dividing the goal value by your SEO costs + project management: strategy, developers, editors, management, etc.

SEO Investment

First, you need to know the cost of your investment. Add up the expense for each step involved in creating, launching, and reporting on an SEO campaign.

For example:

• $1,500 site audit
• $1,500 campaign #1 strategy
• $3,500 strategy implementation
• $500 custom reporting

Total SEO Investment = $7,000 for Campaign 1

Now, let’s calculate the return.

Return on SEO

Jot down the average percent of leads (or downloads) that turn into a sale. And, what the lifetime value of that partnership is.

In other words, what is the average consumer’s profit margin over the course of their relationship with your company?

Number of Customers Example:

• Campaign average monthly traffic: 5,000
• Conversion rate to lead: 2%
  • 100 leads
• Closing conversion rate (lead to sale): 2%
• Customers attributed to the campaign per month: 2

Customer Lifetime Value Example:

• Average customer contract is $90,000
• X average duration (3 years) = $270,000
• Profit margin per client is 15%
• Average customer lifetime value is $40,500

Projected Profit:

• CLV x # of new customers = $81,000

SEO ROI Formula

Search Engine Optimization ROI can be calculated by multiplying customer lifetime value by the number of new customers per month minus cost of investment divided by cost of investment.

Example Continued:

($40,500 x 2) – $7,000 / $7,000

($81,000 – $7,000) / $7,000

$71,000 / $7,000 = 10.14

The ROI for SEO Campaign 1 example is 1,014.28%.

If you are making edits that affect pages that are currently live on the site, be sure to calculate the ROI of these pages before and after your edits so you can show the % lift.

Data Studio is a powerful, user-friendly Google tool that allows you to build custom digital marketing reports with ease.

Get a reliable and easy-to-read snapshot of indexed pages on Google and indexed keywords on Google over time.

View useful information about how well your marketing efforts are performing and discover areas where improvements can be made.

By setting up a one-time template, running these reports for yourself or your clients on a regular basis becomes quick and efficient while enabling data-driven decision-making. 

In part one of this tutorial, Kayle Larkin shows you how to add Google Search and Search Console data sources to Data Studio for a quick look at how many pages you have indexed on Google, how many keywords are indexed, and how that data is trending.

Learn to add scorecards and a time series line chart to make the data and trends clearly visible. And see how Kayle Larkin uses data control as a time-saving tip. 

How-To Prepare a Data Studio Report

Preparing a new Data Studio report takes just minutes. This example features Google Analytics and Search Console data for pages and keyword indexing but once you understand the process, you can easily adapt it to build additional reports that are specific to your needs. 

Building an SEO Dashboard in Data Studio

1. Open a new Data Studio report. 
2. Click “Add Data” at the top of the navigation bar for this report.
   • This will bring up a box where you can scroll through available data sources.
   • Roughly 20 of the options are for Google tools; Data Studio works with more than 300 additional partner connectors.
3. Select the accounts and properties of the account you want to use.
   • Repeat this process to add more than one data source.
   • In this video example, we’re going to add Search Console and Google Analytics.
4. Name each data set something unique to make it easier to distinguish what you’re looking at: site data, search impressions from Search Console, and URL impressions from Search Console. 
5. Come back to the main page of your new report.

Next, we will add a quick visual representation of how many keywords are ranking on Google and how many pages are indexed.

How to Add Scorecards to Data Studio

1. Click “Add a Chart,” and then “Add Scorecard.”
   • In the menu on the right, you can reformat the scorecards.
2. Under Metric, select “Landing Page” and “Count Distinct.”
3. Repeat “Add a Chart” and “Add Scorecard,” and under Metric, select “Query.”
4. In our video example, we can see that we have 43 pages indexed on Google and 395 keywords.
5. You can click on the text of the scorecard to edit it; in our example, we use Pages on Google, and Keywords. 
6. Use the mouse to slide around the position of the scorecards as needed.
7. The report has a grid lines feature that allows you to align the scorecards precisely; you’ll see those grid lines show up as you hold down and move the scorecard.
8. The scorecard will show the results of the datasets you previously chose. 

And now you can create a chart to see how these metrics have changed over time.

How to Add a Time Series Chart

1. Click “Add a Chart” and then “Time Series Chart”.
2. Drag the perimeters of the chart to fill as much of the page as you want.
3. Change the type of date to month/year using Default Date Range settings on the right-side menus.
   • There are custom and advanced settings here that allow you to tailor the report.
   • It’s recommended that you use the previous 12 months for clarity and consistency over time, although you can adjust the date range to your needs. 
4. Now, looking at your report, the metrics you’ve selected will be represented by lines on the chart.
5. Use the style selections on the right to separate the lines, making them easier to distinguish.
6. Place series one along the left axis and series two along the right to give each the appropriate series numbers.

Adding a Data Control to Save Time

Click “Add a Data Control” at the top navigation bar so you don’t have to recreate the report for every single one of your clients.

You can just click the data control box at the upper left of the report to select whichever other client you want to view here, and their data will automatically populate the chart. 

Book a call with Kayle Larkin today and learn how Google Data Studio can transform your understanding of your site’s traffic and performance to boost your marketing success and drive performance-led decisions. 

Video: How Many Pages and Keywords are Indexed? SEO Data Studio Report Tutorial 

Transcript of “How Many Pages and Keywords are Indexed? SEO Data Studio Report Tutorial” video: 

Today, I’ll show you the first piece of the all-in-one search console or SEO reporting dashboard: how many pages you have indexed on google, how many keywords are indexed, and then how that has performed over time.

The first thing to do when you open up a new Data Studio report is you’re going to need to add your data. So here we’re going to click “Add Data” for this report. 

We’re going to be using primarily Search Console but also Google Analytics, so we’re going to select our sources here. Not quite done yet… let’s add more data sources. There’s Search Console, and we’ll need to add the site impression and the URL impression. 

And I’m actually going to go into our “Manage Data Sources” here so that we can name these and not get confused in the future. And name this one… was the “site impression”. So let’s see, for Search Console one, we’ll add one more data source–the URL impression. Make sure your property perimeter is the same and we’ll edit this one to have “URL impression.” Done. 

Now we need these little boxes–here are scorecards. We will “Add Scorecard.” And this is going to be a landing page but we’re going to reformat it to be “Count Distinct”–yes–and then we’ll do one more but now instead of “landing page,” we’ll have “query” so we can see that we have 43 pages indexed on Google and 395 keywords… Just going to name this “Pages on Google keywords”. 

And the other thing we want to do is create a chart to see how this has changed over time. 

Now we’ll add a time series chart. And we’re working with the data source URL impressions from Search Console. “Dimensions,” change date but we’re going to change the type of date to probably month/year and our default date range. We’re going to create “Custom” and come down here to “Advanced.”

We want to see the last 12 months. If you do just the last year, you’re going to run into problems when the year changes over, and you want to look at the previous month because if you do just the day before, then your charts are going to look funky until the end of the month and may worry some clients. And then this we want to be…

The metric is going to be what is shown in our line here–query–and our secondary metric will be landing pages. Now we need to separate the lines here so that this flows a little bit nicer.

Series one we have on the left axis and series two, the landing page, we’re going to change to the right axis so that we get that varying flows with their own appropriate series numbers. Let’s see, yes–and if you wanted to, you can add a data control here so you don’t have to change for every single one of your clients. You can just choose whichever other client you want to view here.

Improve your understanding of SEO tools and do more in less time. Subscribe for more Analytics in Minutes.

These tutorials guide you through the process of gathering and presenting important metrics in ways that offer new insights built on actionable analysis.