Good SEO practices are a must for your blog to succeed. SEO success is important, with SEO and content marketing being inextricably linked with each other. There are several ways to measure SEO impact, so let’s check out the formula for measuring SEO success.
Importance of SEO
More than 89% consumers begin a purchase by using the Search engine, so there are no two opinions on the importance of good SEO practices in your marketing campaign.
It offers long-term value for your site and greater visibility and conversion rates for your brand. The first page on Google search invariably nabs the chunk of all clicks, with the first three in the list nabbing most of these clicks.
Top blog posts can generate high traffic and increase visits to your website.
Why Tracking/Measuring SEO Impact is Important
You can improve only when you measure something. A good SEO analysis tool can help you boost your SEO campaign, offer improved SEO content writing, and improve the search engine ranking of your blog post.
Your blog, website and brand will reap the benefits. Evaluating SEO impact accurately as well as practically is the key to blogging success.
Knowing the exact number of views and other tracking details is useful for evaluating SEO impact and identifying any weakness in your SEO strategy.
For instance, if you notice that the traffic had suddenly increased from rather irrelevant referral links, it does not offer much value. On the other side of the coin, if traffic dramatically falls, you can make appropriate changes to your SEO campaign to make it more SEO friendly.
How to measure SEO performance?
The Metrics That Should be Monitored for Tracking the Success of Your SEO Strategy are:
#1) SEO Rankings
- Make a search on Google for your specific keywords and check out the rankings of your blog posts.
This also includes the images appearing for the search. This will help you improve your SEO copywriting to attract the targeted audience.
#2) No of Views Over a Period of Time
- Record the number of page views weekly, monthly, after a three-month period, a year and so on. Record the number of views with a consistent source of measurement for all posts.
- Analyze different sources to enable an accurate SEO performance test.
- Measure the direct navigation through bookmarks; typed in search traffic; email links traffic, etc.
- Traffic from referrals from emails, promotional links.
- Traffic from all search engines. Comparing contribution of each of the engines.
- You can learn a lot from this. For instance, if traffic from Google has dropped but that of other search engines continue to remain the same, the culprit could be Google penalties or devaluation by Google. On the other hand, if traffic from all engines drop, the issue could be with accessibility of your post.
- Social media visits. Check out and monitor user engagement for your posts on social platforms, such as Facebook, Pinterest and so on. Though the engagement will not directly translate into more page views, it does impact visits to your website over a period of time, boosting search engine ranking as well.
#3) Search Query Phrases and Conversion Rates
Conversion is important for the bottom line of your brand.
- Measure the query terms or phrases used by those who signed up to your site, to find out the terms that offer the maximum conversion. You can ask your freelance content writer to make optimum use of these keywords.
- For instance, in the graph below 5.8% of the visitors using the term ‘SEO tools’ had signed up to the site during their visit.
- Based on this result, you can check out your search engine ranking for this particular keyword: SEO tools, and try to improve your position for this phrase. It helps you find keywords for SEO article writing that can send more visitors who convert into customers.
SEO Success Measuring Tools
As part of important SEO tips, use Google Analytics or other tools for SEO metrics for free SEO analysis.
#1) Measuring Traffic
- Measure the volume of traffic coming from organic search.
- The amount of traffic depends on the size of your targeted audience. For instance, if you are targeting business card printers from all over the nation, you will get more traffic than if you are looking for incoming traffic to a local physician.
- Sometimes, there is a fall in the traffic, and you immediately jump to the conclusion that the organic search has reduced. Not necessarily. It is quite possible that organic traffic could be the same or even increased, whereas other traffic has come down.
- Use Google Analytics to check out the organic search traffic and compare it with other traffic, like Direct, Referral, paid search, social, emails and so on.
#2) Measure the Quality of the Traffic.
- You might think quality is too abstract to measure. Yet, you can measure the quality of the traffic as well though it is admittedly a little tricky.
- Use the Assisted Conversions feature and check out the data for each month. Compare it with previous months. Use the report generated to find whether there is an improvement or decline in the search traffic. If the search traffic remains the same, but the conversions have reduced, it shows that the quality of the traffic is low. More visitors have come in but it has not resulted in conversions.
- Other metrics helping in qualitative analysis are:
- Checking the number of pages each visit.
- The duration of each visit.
- The bounce rate.
- If the above are found to be low, there is probably a problem with the keywords you are using. You could make the necessary changes with the content writing services you are using.
#3) Measure Page Loading Time
- Optimizing page loading times is an essential part of SEO best practices, as it can affect the user experience.
- Identify a slow loading page and see the effect it has on your conversion rates.
- You can use the Behavior, Site Speed, Page Timings in Google Analytics to check this out.
- Check out the average loading time and compare it with the average exit percentage.
- You will notice that if the loading time increases, the average exit percentage also increases.
- Try to improve the loading times. Run the report again and then compare it with the previous one to see whether you were able to retain more of the traffic.
#4) Check out Popular Landing Pages
- Check out the top landing pages for a specific period.
- Once you find these pages, you can add more content aiming at writing for SEO, or add related posts and interlink them.
#5) Measure/Compare Site Strength
- With Domain Authority, you can compare your website strength with the competition. The reports range from 1 to 100, with 100 presenting total domain authority.
- The higher the number, it shows that you have a strong link profile and are considered more trustworthy.
#6) Tracking Keyword Ranking
- It is an important aspect of SEO optimization tips. You can create an SEO strategy around the keywords that offer the maximum benefit.
- For instance, if you are tracking around 30 top keywords for your site and most of them are on the top-ranking page. You can optimize your content around these keywords.
- Again, if you find that too many competitors are also using the same keywords, you will not get much benefit from using it. You can then focus on other keywords such LSI keywords and Long Tail Keywords.
#7) Monetary Value
- Calculate the ROI by knowing the monetary value of your conversions.
- You can also get a more accurate calculation by calculating the lifetime monetary value of customers, instead of just the initial purchase value.
#8) Tracking Backlinks
- The tool will help in indexing any new backlink when it appears online.
- Use tools that also show the follow or no follow links, along with tracking of anchor texts.
- Use tools to show you general trends over time – whether you have increased the number of backlinks or lost them over a period of time.
Measuring SEO is challenging, but it helps in knowing more about the quantity and quality of the traffic.
Though the above are some of the metrics you need to measure to improve your SEO strategy and ranking, you need to pinpoint the ones that actually resonate with your customers.
SEO analysis is important to know whether your strategy is actually working. You need to know how your site is performing when compared to the competition. You should also know how it is performing with search engines.
Using the necessary SEO tools will help you track the metrics and translate the results into any practical improvements that you can implement in your SEO strategy. Using the ammunition can offer you actionable data for making right decisions.