Measuring SEO Effectiveness

If you can measure something than you can improve on it, right? This applies to your web page SEO tracking as well. There are several aspects of SEO that you can measure and by doing so will help you improve when trying to meet your goals.

Goals are important in themselves. Whether it is your goals or your clients business goals, it is an important element to establish for success. When building for a client they could have different goals than other clients. Make sure you understand these goals so you can properly assess your SEO tracking approach.

Establishing Client Goals for SEO Tracking

When working with a business it is important to create and understand the goals of the business client. Some good questions to ask your client are:

• Can you give us a brief history of your company?
• What is the monetary value of a newly qualified lead?
• What are your most profitable products/services (in order)?

Make sure that when establishing these goals that they are measurable. This is why we ask about the monetary value of a lead and the most profitable products. It is also important to be specific in your goals. Broad and vague goals are never followed through like a specific goal. For example, instead of having a goal stating “I want new followers,” be more specific like “I want 500 new followers in the next 30 days.”

Engagement Metrics

There are several elements that you should be measuring when understanding data while SEO tracking. It is important to understand these elements and how viewers engage within your pages.

Your conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of unique visits. This can be applied to anything from a sale to an email set up. Knowing this information can help in defining your return on investment (ROI).

The time on page element describes how long a viewer spends on your page. This can be effective in judging how your content rates to viewers. For example, if you have a 1000-2000 word article and the viewers only stay on the page for 6 seconds then they’re clearly not absorbing all of the information you have to offer. But at the same time there are pages like the Contact page that wouldn’t expect a long time on page.

Pages per visit is an important metric if your goal is to have your visitor see multiple pages on your site before leaving. If your page is independent and doesn’t relate to other pages than its not bad to have a low metric.

Bounce rate is when a visitor clicks on your page but leaves immediately without actually looking at any of your content. This metric isn’t used alone to determine your page success. If you had a brick and mortar business the visitor may have just been searching for an address or call number so they could visit in person.

A better metric to use to analyze your site is Scroll Depth. This shows how far the visitor actually scrolled down your page. Did they reach the important content or leave before reading it. This is effective in judging the lay out or success of your page.

Analyzing Traffic

Ranking is important for SEO but its not enough to be at the top of a Google SERP. Your business still needs to get clicks and have organic traffic to your page. Google Analytics is a great tool You can use to use information for SEO tracking.

Google Analytics allows you to observe and track an insane amount of data. If you don’t know what you’re looking for it could be a bit overwhelming. We will cover some of the more basic and important data types.

Organic traffic to your page can be sorted by channel. By isolating the traffic channels you can tell where the traffic is coming from or explain a rapid fluctuation. For example, if you run an add campaign and the campaign ends, you may get a drastic change to the amount of traffic to your site.

You can also break down your site and analyze the performance of each page as opposed to just an overall site statistic.

Your Click-Through-Rate shows the percentage of people that clicked onto your page from a search result. This can be effective in determine the performance of your title information and meta descriptions.

Evaluating SEO Tracking Opportunities

Besides Google Analytics, there are many other useful tracking tools available out there. By Understanding this data and how your site is structured you can begin to use that data to find some good SEO tracking opportunities.

With Google Search Console you can detect website errors, opportunities and user engagement. It is a free tool so visit the link to sign up.

Lighthouse Audit is another Google tool. You can use Lighthouse to measure web performance and accessibility.This will help you understand how a site is performing and what kind of updates you can make to your site.

By Evaluating your different pages of your site you can improve the overall perceived quality of your site. This could mean updating or revamping an old page to be more up-to-date or relevant or evening removing old pages that don’t get visits anymore. This would overall help your SEO.

SEO tracking isn’t a one size fits all. Many campaigns you start will be less successful than others. Some won’t be successful at all. But keep at it. Use the knowledge you now have to complete trial and errors until you determine what is successful. Keep an eye out for those trends and utilize tools like Google Analytics.