Dear SEO beginner, here is a shocker – increasing website visibility is not all there is to SEO! In fact, driving more organic or paid traffic to your website and increasing sales are also not the crux of it. These count, but SEO is progressive. Without consistent tracking or monitoring, SEO success would be short-lived. Tracking SEO success ensures consistent results in retaining website visitors and giving out constant value. And in this article, you’ll learn 5 tips on how to track SEO success.
1. Keyword performance and rankings
It is not enough to use a keyword when optimizing your website content. You must also set an avenue in place to track the performance of these keywords. When irrelevant keywords or phrases are used in the content, hardly will it be indexed by search engine crawlers. And when crawlers are unable to index your content, your website page won't be visible in the search result pages (SERPs). This automatically results in a low-ranking experience for your website. Hence, you must always keep track of your keyword performance.
2. Organic Traffic
Driving organic traffic to the website is the goal of every website owner when it comes to SEO marketing. Regardless of whether they want users to purchase their products, order for their services, or even subscribe to their blog. Your ability to monitor the number of visitors that visit your site from the search engine will give you an idea of where and how to channel your efforts in engaging these visitors to achieve your goal. This metric gives you quantifiable clue that your actions are generating more visitors, leads, and ideally, conversion. Google Analytics made it easier for a website owner to track organic traffic easily.
3. Conversion Rate
Usually, the goal of using SEO is to generate leads or get more people to buy your products and increase revenue. Hence, you naturally would not stop at just generating organic traffics. Tracking your conversion rate will help you know the percentage of your website visitors that act on your site. You'll also be able to recognize if the traffic you've generated is relevant to your website content or not. When the traffic driven to your website by the search engine is irrelevant, you won't be able to turn them into leads or sales.
4. Page Speed
This measures how quickly your page loads. A page that loads slowly gives users a bad experience and they tend not to come back there. This reduces the possibility of ranking high on Google search engine result pages (SERPs). You must seek to boost the time it takes to display the full content on your page. Google PageSpeed Insights tool gives you the best way to track your page speed. It helps you to know the performance of each page and also suggests how you can improve this performance.
5. Engagement Metrics
This plays an important part in determining SEO rankings. It gives you insights into how users are engaging with your site. These metrics include
Bounce rate: the number of visitors who left your site without clicking on any link.
Time on site: the amount of time spent on your site by visitors.
Pages per visit: the number of pages visitors go through on your site before exiting.
The more engagement your site gets from these users suggests that they like your website's content and they find it beneficial. When you keep track of these metrics, it helps you to know where and what to improve on in your SEO campaign.