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:
Keep the following tips in mind while setting up your primary goal:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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:
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.
eSearch Logix Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Address (Delhi/NCR): 1st Floor, H-161, Sector 63,
Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
SALES (INDIA): +91-836-8198-238
SALES (INT.): +1-(702)-909-2783
HR DEPTT.: +91-977-388-3610