Measuring Your SEO Results
At the beginning of any search engine optimization (SEO) effort, you need to define your business goals and what you expect to get out of the project.
Once you have defined your goals, you need to think about all of the things that need to happen to be able to achieve those goals, including the strength of the SEO effort. You need to measure your SEO results.
When you are choosing your domain name, remember to choose one of the most common top level domains, such as .com, .net or .org. You need to measure your performance by using tools such as Google Analytics. This will give you a thorough understanding of whether your website is working and where your visitors are coming from. That is the only way that you will know how to tweak what needs to be tweaked.
Another very easy way to improve your search engine rankings is to have a blog. Blog postings can be used for targeted keywords and optimized meta-tags. You can also post your articles on other websites, which will increase traffic.
Ranking Reports
One of your main goals when it comes to SEO is to achieve as high a ranking in the search engines as possible. There are many programs available that can help you to set up and monitor your rankings. The disadvantage of these types of products is that they scrape search engine results, which is against the service terms of search engines.
Additionally, the data in that situation are deceptive. The search engine ranking exercises that result from using one of the programs mentioned above focus on high-volume terms, which make up a small percentage of the total search volume. Remember that search engine rankings data can vary for many reasons, including which search engine server is reporting the results.
Number of added links
There are many ways to obtain a large number of links back to your website. You can buy links for a small price, although it can be risky to do that because you may be buying links that don’t have a lot of value. You need to understand that a single link can be as valuable as thousands other links. You need to choose the links very carefully. Your links should not just be taking up space. They should serve a valuable purpose.
It is an excellent idea to not only track links but to also measure the quality of the links. You should measure in terms of volume of activity and not in terms of it being a metric of success.
Nonbranded search traffic
You should concentrate on your daily, unique visitors and track that over time. Another important thing to remember is to exclude branded website traffic because very few websites need SEO help to rank for their brand name. The reason for this is that one of the most common forms of anchor text that other people will use when implementing links to their website homepage with be the name of the business.
Engaging your website visitors
Visitor engagement, which includes page views per visitor, how much time the visitors spend on your website and bounce rate, are all important to keep track of. When you are focusing on metrics, make sure to include visitor engagement as a measure of the success of your business.
If you see a bounce rate that is higher than usual or you see that the amounts of time that your website visitors are staying is decreasing, it may be an indication of that your website traffic quality is going down. It can also possibly be an indication that there is some problem with your website itself.
Conversions
Conversions are the most important things to measure. You need to be able to tell how your organic search traffic is doing in successfully converting into actual customers. The easiest metric for this is the sales of your product or service. However, conversions can also include requests to contact you through your website, completed forms, whitepaper downloads or visitors to a particular webpage of yours.
Even though visitor engagement and website traffic are definitely factors in measure the success of your SEO project, measuring conversions is even more essential.
In conclusion
All of the metrics that we have discussed are valuable in some way. You can customize your list of metrics in any way that you choose. Just remember to make sure that you measure nonbranded traffic, visitor engagement and conversions, as well as anything else you wish to add to the list.
We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.
