As a Magento eCommerce store owner you most likely have an SEO strategy in place and have optimized your web content for important keywords relating to your business and products. If so – fantastic! If not, then you need to do that first before reading this article!
It’s one thing to have an SEO campaign, but you must be active in your monitoring and tracking to make it truly effective. If you optimize your Magento store and then never touch your SEO again, it will ultimately prove futile as trends and SEO practices change.
This is why it is important to track and measure the success of your SEO campaigns to continually improve your Magento online store.
Before Tracking Anything You Need to Set Goals
- The first step to successful SEO for your Magento store is to set goals and understand what you want to achieve.
- Do you want your SEO to boost brand awareness? Maybe you want to see a 100% increase in website traffic? Perhaps you want to see more conversions and a boost in sales?
- Be specific and set a handful of realistic goals with defined parameters – not just vague things you want to achieve. Some common SEO goals include:
- – Reducing bounce rates
- – Increasing website traffic
- – Increasing conversions
- – Increasing clickthrough rates
- – Improving search engine visibility
- You need an array of goals like these so that you have data to find and measure. Make notes of these goals and make sure that all members of your team or business are aware of them too.
- It is vital that everyone is on the same page so you can have a cohesive approach to your SEO strategies and Magento online store management.
- With goals set, you can then define some review points. These should be regular – monthly perhaps to start with. At these points, you can then use the tools we discuss below to track and monitor progress and see if you are achieving your SEO goals.
Google Analytics is Essential for Magento Store Owners
Magento store owners have access to a myriad of tools and Magento SEO consulting can explain these in detail and help you set them up. A fantastic starting point, however, is Google Analytics.
This is the go-to analytical tool for most businesses – it’s free to use, links directly with other Google products like Google Keyword Planner, and most importantly is linked to the most powerful search engine in the world.
Magento users can add code snippets and tracking codes into their dashboard and website to allow the use of Google Analytics. This gives you access to a wealth of analytical data and real-time statistics that you can then use to measure the success of your SEO and compare this with your goals.
The first step is to register an account with Google Analytics and set up your business on it. This is relatively easy and you have to enter basic company info like your currency, timezone, and business size. With your Google Analytics profile created you can then create a Universal Analytics Tracking Code and insert it into your Magento store.
Google Analytics has an incredible amount of data including:
– Customer demographics (age, location, etc)
– Individual web page statistics
– Channel statistics (where people access your site from like social media and ads)
– Loading speeds
– Website traffic metrics
All of this data allows you to see exactly how your Magento store is performing and what improvements must be made to your SEO campaigns.
SEO Without Performance Monitoring is Redundant
SEO is a continual process and the strategies you use will have to evolve to keep up with the latest trends and updates from Google regardless of what type of platform you use. The first step for continual improvement is to set goals and have a direction for your SEO.
With this set in stone, you can utilize tools like Google Analytics to monitor the performance of your Magento store’s SEO and make changes where needed.
