4 Must-Answer Questions to Measure SEO Success
Whether you are in the field of online sales (transactional site or e-commerce) in the sale of a technological product or you are advertising a service, you must have one or more of the following goals – need more visitors, need more leads, need more customers, or need to get your customers to buy more. That said, if you are dealing with web experts, they probably developed with you various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in SEO to measure these goals. These indicators will provide you indeed necessary information to measure the impact of your marketing strategies, and see if this investment is worth it.
Why measure?
Since it is not yet clear to all, start with the basics – why we need to have a SEO strategy? The reason is very simple; an SEO strategy will allow you to research the competition, establish their position on certain keywords, analyze if some of these competitors are doing paid advertising (e.g. AdWords), and ultimately to choose what keywords would be most useful to your positioning. By following your competitors and your market on a regular basis, you are better placed to act quickly. You will be able to adapt if a competitor tries to downgrade you or if a new competitor is more aggressive than you in positioning. Remember, rankings on the search engines are evolving. Thus, it is not because you are top of the list one day you will be the next day.
Do not forget who you talk to when you establish your keyword strategy. The terms used by the industrial business leaders will not be the same as those used by the elderly. After all, you do not talk to your grandmother in the same way that to your boss. Your customer is the source of your strategy. You will need and take the time to make your ideal customer profile before proceeding further.
How to measure?
To track your SEO measures, you have to integrate your performance indicators and build a dashboard. To do this, you should choose a web statistics tool. You probably already know the most popular ones. This is of course Google Analytics, which is available through a Google Account. Using the analytics dashboard, you may have a better understanding of the traffic to your site, conversion rates, and number of visitors… If you keep monitoring your website data, you will be able to measure changes in relation to traffic, know which pages of your site are most popular, check your conversion rates, etc. So you can act to increase performance and optimizing your website continuously.
What to measure?
There is no general answer to fit all situations. Metrics that will be important for some will be less for others. It all depends on your individual goals, your customers and your industry. Take the example of a website where one is playing videos, a high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing since visitors can leave the page as soon as their viewing is complete. On the other hand, the time spent on the site during a visit would be a great indicator because it would check if visitors look at the videos or not.
When we talk about SEO, you should know that it is organic traffic. The number of sessions you will know the traffic obtained through your SEO and to compare it to your other channels – such as social networks or your paid search campaigns. If this number increases from month to month, then your traffic increases and you are better able to convert more visitors into customers.
Your landing pages are the gateways to your website from your various campaigns and your positioning on the search results pages. Your landing pages are usually optimized for a particular offer. This offer has normally been designed with a series of specific keywords. Since the different pages of your website should be positioned on one topic per page, each page will contain a few keywords chosen during your SEO strategy. Knowing what landing pages get the most traffic, you will be able to know what keywords are the most efficient in your targeting strategy. Therefore, you can analyze the landing pages regularly and adjust the content of the pages that are most popular, so that you will know what should be prioritized for your marketing efforts each month.
When measure?
You should get used to measure and record your performance every month. This way you will be sure not to lose the thread of your SEO performance.
If your traffic decreased substantially all of a sudden, have you thought about the impact could have on your leads, your prospecting and your team sales? By optimizing the SEO of your site regularly, you will be able to know if your traffic and your leads increase every month; you will also understand what content is the most popular on your site. These elements will help you greatly in developing your content strategy.
