We all know that the point of an SEO campaign is to get your website to rank as high as possible for as many search terms or keywords as possible. However, along with your search ranking goals, there are other metrics that you should be tracking along the way. The ultimate goal isn’t just appearing high in the rankings and getting a lot of visitors. It’s converting those visitors to sales. Here are the most important metrics you need to follow when conducting an SEO campaign.
Organic Traffic Metrics
Organic traffic is the number of people who visit your site by linking from search engine ranking pages. This does not include anyone who came through a paid ad. The total number will only give you a partial view of the situation. You should also be tracking it by page to determine where your SEO efforts have been working, and where they need improvement.
Check as well where your visitors are coming from. If they are not coming from your targeted geographical location, then you may need to adjust some things. You can get as detailed as you want. From as broad as visits by country, to as narrow as visits by city. With this information, you can then make smart decisions about where to allocate your marketing budget to get the most bang for your buck.
Your Keywords that are Ranking and the Keywords You Should Try to Rank
You also want to know what keywords are ranking for you. What keywords you are ranking for. And also, which ones you want to rank for. Sometimes, keywords that you are ranking for aren’t necessarily the ones that you were focusing on. For instance, if you run an online company that sells car parts, you might end up ranking for ‘car batteries’ without even trying. This is a good thing because you sell car batteries. However, there are also keywords that you are trying to rank for, such as ‘car parts’. You need to track how well you are doing with those keywords and make improvements if necessary. You can use the Google Search Console for help with both of these metrics.
Backlinks
Along with using keywords effectively, your SEO efforts will largely be affected by the number of quality backlinks pointing to your website. Quality backlinks tell search engines that you are authoritative and relevant enough for other reputable sites to link to you. You can use a backlink monitoring web tool to give you the number and the quality of sites that link to you. There are tools that will track when new backlinks show up. If you are lacking in quality backlinks to your website, you can hire a link building company to devise a strategy to build your link portfolio. Link building might be the most important aspect of SEO.
Conversion Rate
Good SEO will get clicks on your website. However, once they are there you need them to convert to customers. That’s why the conversion rate of your organic traffic is so important. If you are not converting the people who visit, then there is most likely a good reason for it, and you need to identify what it is and fix it quickly. It might be an issue with the landing page, for instance. If it’s unclear what the user should do, or if it loads too slowly, users will click away quickly. If for some reason your content on that page isn’t engaging with your potential customers, then that will affect your conversion rate as well.
Page Loading Speed
Much like your backlink portfolio, page loading speed can have a major impact on your SEO. For starters, if your pages take too long to load, then visitors will click away, and you will have a high bounce rate. This is the rate of people who leave your site after only a few seconds. Google will take this to mean that the content on your page isn’t actually what visitors are searching for, and you will be penalized in rankings because of it. Google will also factor page speed on its own when examining your website, and it will negatively affect you. There are many tools available to test your page loading speed. You may need to resize images and videos to increase your speed.
Mobile Rankings
Having your website optimized for mobile use is more important than ever. This is especially so when 80 per cent of users use their mobile phones or devices to search the internet. That number has jumped from 60 per cent compared to just 5 years ago. That’s a huge segment of the market that you might be missing if your website doesn’t function properly for those users. If you are lagging behind, then you need to fix it. It could bet that your site isn’t’ properly optimized, or that you aren’t using keywords that mobile users would search with. Since many of those searches are using voice technology, you should focus on long tail keywords to capture them.
It might amaze you to truly understand how much goes into effective SEO. To get a better picture of how you are doing, you have to go beyond simply tracking your organic traffic. Digging deeper into the analytics will give you a more detailed look at what is happening with your SEO, and how you can make necessary improvements to get to the top.
