You need to be able to track and measure your SEO success, only then is there any scope for you to improve and amplify it. This is why every professional SEO ensures to track every SEO activity and outcomes such as rankings, conversions, lost links, and more.
It is critical for your SEO success, value, and client retention that you measure the impact of your work & continue refining it over time. With tracking your SEO progress, you also have the option to change or pivot from your SEO plan if things are not going your way.
Begin With the End in Mind
Even though it’s pretty common to have multiple goals associated with an SEO plan, both micro and macro, now you need to establish one primary end goal that you’ll put all your efforts towards. The only way for you to know your website’s primary end goals is to first have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve overall and what are your client’s needs.
If you set up good client questions, it will not only help you in strategically directing your efforts but also show the clients that you care.
Here are some examples of good client questions:
- Will you be able to provide us with a brief history of your company?
- Can you tell us the monetary value of a newly qualified lead?
- Can you tell us your most profitable products and services?
Keep the following tips in mind while setting up your primary goal:
- It should be measurable. It’s simple, if you can’t measure it then you can’t improve it.
- Be as specific as possible. Don’t let industry jargon bog down your idea of a goal.
- Share your goals. According to many researchers, if you write down your goals and share them with others then you’re more likely to achieve them.
Measuring
Once your primary goal is set, now it’s time for you to evaluate which additional metrics can help you in the process of reaching your end goal. Also, you can get a better understanding of the health & progress of your site by measuring the additional benchmarks.
Engagement Metrics
You need to be able to check what is the behavior of users once they reach your site. This is the question that you can find answers to with the help of engagement metrics. Here are some of the most important metrics that can help you measure how people engage with your site’s content:
- Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is your number of conversions divided by the number of unique user visits. You can apply the conversion rate to anything such as email signup, account creation, purchase, and more. You must track the conversion rate of your site if you want to gauge the return on investment (ROI) your site traffic would be able to deliver.
- Time Spent on Page
You need to measure the amount of time people spend on your page. There are very slim chances that your content is being consumed if you have a 2,000-word blog and readers are spending only 10secs on the page. However, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if a URL has a low time on the page. For instance, it’s usual for ‘contact us’ pages to have a low average time on the page as people do not have anything to do there.
- Pages Per Visit
If the goal of your page was to keep the readers engaged before taking them to the next step, then pages per visit can be quite a valuable engagement metric for you. However, low pages per visit are okay as long as the goal of your page does not get affected by other pages of your site. For instance, if a visitor comes to a page, gets what they need, and then leaves immediately then it’s okay to have low pages per visit.
- Bounce Rate
If a searcher comes to your page and leaves your site without any further browsing then it’s known as “bounced”. A lot of people believe that bounce rate is tied to website quality so they try to lower this metric, but this gives us very little information about the user experience. For example, there has been a case where a business’s redesigned restaurant website sees a spiked bounce rate but in reality, the business is going well. Later it was discovered that people were just coming to see the location, opening hours, and such information, and then bouncing to visit the establishment. This is why bounce rate cannot be a good metric to judge user experience.
- Scroll Depth
With the help of scroll depth, you can see how far users have scrolled down the individual pages of your site. You can check if the users are reaching your important content. If not, then you can find ways to make sure that they see your important content such as contact forms, multimedia, and more, by putting it higher up on the page.
You need to see if you are putting up useless information on top of the page that’s not enticing the user to scroll down the page. You can set up scroll depth tracking with the help of Google Analytics.
- Search Traffic
Your site needs to rank higher on a search engine, but this can’t be your only metric to measure your site’s organic performance. The main of a site page appears in search is to get chosen by the user as an answer to the entered query. So, if your site is ranking high on the search engine but isn’t getting any site traffic then this could be a potential problem for you.
But now how do you figure out how much traffic your site is receiving from the search? This is where Google Analytics steps in.
Uncover Traffic Insights with the Help of Google Analytics
Google Analytics has all the data that one might need to understand how a website functions and what result it generates. But it can also be quite confusing if one doesn’t know where to look. This is why if you want to understand how much traffic your site is receiving then you must focus on:
- Isolate Organic Traffic- With the help of Google Analytics, you can check the traffic to your site by channel. This would allow you to manage the scares that come with changing to other channels. For instance, if your organic traffic remains steady, but the total traffic dropped steadily because of the halt of a paid campaign.
- Over time traffic to your site- With the help of Google Analytics you will be able to see the total sessions/pageviews/users that your site has received over a specified date range. Additionally, you also have the option to compare two separate ranges.
- The number of visitors a particular page has received- Google Analytics has a feature called site content reports that allow you to evaluate the performance of a particular page. With this, you can get an estimate of how many visitors a particular page has received within a given date range.
- Traffic gathered from a specific campaign- Google Analytics has a feature of UTM (urchin tracking module) codes that you can use for better attribution.
- Click-through rate (CTR)- You can gather great insights about how well you’ve optimized your meta description and page title with the help of your CTR from search results to a particular page. In simple terms, it tells you how many users have clicked on your page from the search results. This data can easily be found in Google Search Console (a free Google tool). In addition, you can use Google Tag Manager (a free tool) to manage & deploy tracking pixels to your site without modifying any code. With this, you can track activities & specific triggers on a site.
Additional SEO Metrics
- Keyword Rankings
A keyword ranking is your website’s ranking for any desired keyword. It includes a lot of SERP feature data such as People Also Ask boxes, featured snippets, and more that you’re ranking for. We also suggest that you avoid the vanity metrics such as ranking for competitive keywords that are desirable but can be quite vague and may not even convert.
- Number of Backlinks
Backlinks are the total number of links that are pointing to your website or the number of unique linking root domains you have. These root domains are sites that have one unique link per website. You must look at the quality of backlinks and linking root domains your site is receiving along with other link metrics.
Read- Chapter 6: Learn Link Building and Establishing Authority for SEO
Use SEO Website Audit to Evaluate a Site’s Health
You can uncover better SEO opportunities by having a more in-depth understanding of certain aspects of your website such as how searchers are interacting with your site, what is your site’s current position in search, what is its overall structure, and more. With the help of the search engine’s tools, you can discover more opportunities, as well as any potential problems:
- Google Search Console– With GSC you can get full actionable reports that help you find website errors, user engagement, and opportunities.
- Bing Webmaster Tools– Just like GSC, the Bing Webmaster tool also gives you an opportunity for improvements by showing how your website is performing in Bing.
- Lighthouse Audit– This is Google’s automated tool that you can use to measure a website’s performance, progressive web apps, accessibility, and more. It helps you understand how your website is performing. It helps you get specific accessibility & speed insights for your website.
- PageSpeed Insights– With this tool you can get website performance insights by using Lighthouse and Chrome User Experience Report data from real user measurement (RUM).
- Structured Data Testing Tool– This tool helps you validate whether a website is using schema markup properly or not.
- Mobile-Friendly Test– With the help of this tool you can check whether a user can navigate your website on a mobile device.
- Web.dev– You can get website improvement insights with the help of Lighthouse and provide the ability to be able to over time track the progress.
- Tools for Web devs and SEOs– Google keeps on providing new tools for SEOs and web developers so stay on the lookout for new releases.
Congratulations on making it to the end of our SEO Guide. This is where the fun begins, now you can apply all the knowledge you’ve gathered and make your SEO plan for your business.
