SEO is a fantastic thing and it’s incredibly important for businesses, but do you ever feel that you don’t really understand what it does or if it’s effective? This is a common feeling and it’s usually because businesses do not actively monitor their SEO performance and look at what results they get.
To make your SEO effective and drive traffic to your website, you need to set goals and measure the success of your optimization and strategies. We take a look at some of the best parameters to measure and how these will help show if your SEO is working.
Parameters to Measure SEO Performance and Results
- SEO can be measured with tangible metrics and it’s not purely about how high you rank on Google. There are many other factors that contribute to the success of your SEO strategies and an SEO agency London would be able to help you with this.
- Below we have listed five SEO metrics that are easy to measure using tools like Google Analytics so you can monitor your SEO performance.
Conversion Rates
The end goal of SEO is to get more sales and profit for your business right? Because of this, conversion rates are the most important SEO performance metric.
A conversion is when a visitor makes an action like clicking on your website from a search engine and then actually does something. Their action results in a net positive for your business.
This could be buying a product, requesting details on a service, sending an email, or signing up for your newsletter for example. The first thing you should do is define your conversion goals and then monitor the rates to see if your SEO is working.
Bounce Rates
A bounce rate is the percentage of people that immediately click off your website after visiting just one page. In most instances, this is not a good thing as it means the visitor is uninterested or didn’t find what they wanted.
You want low bounce rates for your pages where visitors are staying for much longer and are viewing multiple pages. The more they see, the more they learn, and the more likely they are to use your business. You can look at pages with high bounce rates and try to improve the SEO.
Click-Through Rates
While someone simply seeing your website on Google and other search engines is a plus, the real benefit is when they actually click on your link and visit your page.
This is known as the click-through rate and it shows how many people take action and visit your site. A higher click-through rate ultimately leads to more website traffic and conversions which is the end goal for your SEO strategies.
If some pages or PPC adverts have higher click-through rates than others you can look at what makes them successful and try to duplicate it.
Organic Traffic
- When a person types a search term on Google they are given a list of results and adverts. Organic traffic is how many people click on your website from these search pages and it’s one of the most important metrics you can measure with SEO.
- Google Analytics shows organic traffic data so you can clearly see how many people are finding your website through search engines. This is a form of targeted SEO as the person is searching for something directly relating to your business and it usually helps show how effective your keyword optimization is.
Search Engine Rankings
Search Engine RankingsWhile organic traffic is incredibly important and the overall factor you want to measure, looking at search engine rankings for different keywords is vital too for your SEO performance.
In most instances, people will not go past the second page of search results when looking for products and information on Google. We are becoming a lazy society and we want results quickly so websites that appear on the first page of search results have a much higher chance of being clicked on.
Therefore, if you know the rankings for different keywords you can see where you need to improve on-page SEO to get your website greater visibility.
Monitoring Your SEO Performance is Vital for Continued Improvement
By setting goals for your SEO campaigns and regularly monitoring the performance using things like bounce rates and organic traffic you can keep your website on track and make sure the money invested in SEO is worthwhile.
