How do you really monitor how well your fantastic SEO content is performing once you’ve started generating it and have taken all of these steps?
On the surface, this issue appears to have a very simple solution with a few important SEO indicators to concentrate on, but with each statistic, there are certain essential aspects to take into account when you gauge the SEO success of your site.
Keyword Positioning
You can’t pay your employees in rankings, personalisation in search results has made them unpredictable across different locales and difficult to measure, and of course, all they represent is where you show up in search results, so looking at where your site ranks for a list of keywords isn’t the end goal. Some people would even go so far as to say they were deceased. However, gaining a general understanding of your site’s position for key phrases may be a helpful leading indicator of your site’s health.
This does not imply that you should get unduly fixated on rankings for any one phrase. Remember that your ultimate objective is to increase relevant traffic that results in more sales. For example, if you sell blue widgets, is it more crucial that you rank for “blue widgets” or that you develop and implement an SEO experts India strategy that enables you to increase sales of blue widgets in the most effective manner at the lowest possible cost? Use rankings as a general health check rather than a KPI for planning your route.
Several tools are available to you to check your ranks. The majority of them offer largely comparable functions, although other solutions have special features like local or mobile rankings. I advise choosing a free and simple-to-use tool if you’re a small business or just starting out with SEO and focusing on a limited number of the key phrases you want to track to assist you to track your success.
Organic Traffic
A far better leading indicator of the effectiveness of your SEO work is organic traffic. You may get a sense of the real number of people arriving at your site and where they are going by looking at the organic traffic to it.
Most analytics systems make it simple to track organic traffic; as Google Analytics is the most popular and free option, we’ll look at how to access this data there.
By creating a custom report and selecting users and goal completions as your metrics and landing pages as your dimension, you can also dig down to see the exact pages that are generating traffic and goals:
Note: If you don’t pick the organic traffic segment again while viewing this report, you’ll see all of your traffic broken down by page rather than simply unpaid traffic from search engines.
This can be effective for websites that are just getting started with SEO because many of the visitors to your site will come from “branded queries,” or searches that include the name of your company. However, unless Google has punished your site, you will almost probably rank for your brand and receive branded traffic to your site’s home page.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the guide’s keyword section, Google has made it difficult to gather information about the actual keywords people are using to search. However, by examining page-level traffic (traffic to pages other than your site’s home page), you can begin to gain insight into your overall SEO progress. You may gain deeper understanding of the actual phrases generating traffic by using rank data and the strategies described in this guide’s keyword section (and whether your SEO growth is being driven by optimization efforts rather than off-line marketing).
Organic Sales & Leads
Obviously, actual leads, sales, income, and profit should be used as the major metrics for evaluating your search engine optimization performance. The same question applies to any company action: How does this activity affect your bottom line?
Setting up objectives or e-commerce tracking in a program like Google Analytics is the most straightforward solution here. You may use the aforementioned report to examine organic traffic and objectives (or other e-commerce metrics) by landing page, which focuses on identifying the visitors who convert after arriving at your website via an organic search engine (versus people who may have come to your site from PPC or another channel within the window that your analytics tracking can track, then searched for you, then converted).
This appears very simple, and for the majority of organizations, it’s a solid approach to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO services India efforts at first. However, there are a few cautions and considerations with this data:
- Analytics on the web are never ideal. The amount and accuracy of the data accessible may probably wow you if you’re switching from billboards or newspaper advertisements to internet marketing, but there are typically a number of various tracking difficulties that can cause the data you’re seeing to be anywhere from slightly to wildly incorrect.
- Your system can leave tracking gaps. The gap between what you can measure as objectives and actual sales may exist if you have a back-end system that you can’t exactly relate to analytics for whatever reason.
- Metrics for attribution and lifetime value might be challenging. Although this is more of a business and web analytics issue than an SEO-specific one, it can be challenging to determine how to assign sales to various channels and take into account the lifetime value of your site’s visitors.
- In-depth information regarding multi-channel attribution may be found in Avinash Kaushik’s book.
- A excellent description of cohort analysis and multi-touch attribution is provided by KISS Metrics.
- These two websites provide some excellent advice for producing relevant SEO reports using Omniture, a famous commercial web analytics product that might have a high learning curve.