The marketing world has changed so much in two decades.
A perpetual increase in internet users and especially social media users globally, creates a higher and higher demand to market products or services online, otherwise risk losing your product to a business who is more marketing savvy.
For your business to succeed, you need to consistently teach yourself about the new ways to market and the new social media platforms that you can market on.
Tracking your website’s Search Engine Optimization is important to monitor the success of your business and can only be done via tracking the metrics behind it.
How do I monitor SEO progress?
To monitor SEO progress, you need to monitor what is known as SEO metrics which are statistics and data that tell you about different aspects of who is visiting your website and how they are responding to it.
Monitoring your rankings and website performance is crucial in understanding who is visiting your website, as well as how and why.
By monitoring your SEOs, you might find that people are only coming from backlinks and not from Google. Or that people are exiting your site on certain pages and converting on others.
Business owners will generally hire a marketing manager whose job it is to track SEO metrics daily.
If you’re a small business and want to do it yourself then you need to have a multi-metric tracking system in place to track website traffic and other important metrics.
What metrics do you use to measure SEO success?
There are a lot of metrics to consider when understanding how your website is performing. The most important metrics are dependent on what you offer and what you are personally looking for.
Speak to a marketing professional today to figure out where the selling point is for your website.
There are many metrics to look at to infer how you are succeeding online, these metrics can include:
- Organic conversion
- Organic traffic
- General traffic
- New users
- Multi-session users
- Referral traffic
- Paid traffic
- Performed site search
- Non-bounce sessions
- Non-converter users
- Domain rating
- Bounce rate
- Time on site
- Organic visibility
What is KPI in SEO?
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, they include data that indicates how a website is performing in one area, they include most SEOs plus data that can not be subbed into a line graph like demographic and location related data of the users.
Som KPIs include:
- Domain ranking
- Target keywords ranking
- The demographic of users
- How a user got to the page
- Backlink availability
- The city of the user
- Online reviews and ratings
KPIs also include single figures that represent a trend for a specific time period.
For example, say if you have a website that requires members to sign up and then pay on a monthly basis, if you were calculating the “customer renewal rate” for the month of June, you could divide the customers that renewed their membership that month by the total number of customers.
This would give you a single figure, and this figure would be considered a KPI.
The “customers that renewed this month” and “total number of customers” are SEOs and KPIs because both of them can have individual values and they also can be plotted on a line graph to show a trend over time.
The “customer renewal rate” figure is only a KPI as it is a single figure for one month.
You should look at all SEO metrics and KPIs to monitor the overall success of your keywords and your progress. Honing in on only a few metrics won’t give you the whole picture of how your business is succeeding online.
We define some of these SEO terms, individually, that might be harder to understand and lesser known.
Performed site search
Information given under “performed site search” means those users came from a link on a search engine and not from typing the website straight in, clicking on an ad, clicking the link in their bookmarks etc.
Backlink availability
Backlink availability is not to be confused with paid traffic. If someone visits your website via a backlinks that means they got to your website through a link from another website.
These links are strictly incorporated via the original page owner and not because you paid them to do so. Think of it as free advertising.
When looking at the backlink metrics, consider the context of the backlink; is it accurately incorporated, is there much interaction after someone comes from a backlink and is it a good website that you want to associate your brand with.
It is desirable if the backlink is from a website with a high domain
A study done by Backlinko saw over 1 million Google searches and found that there is a strong correlation between your domain ranking and the number of backlinks.
Paid traffic
Paid traffic is traffic that exists from visitors clicking a link in an advertisement for your business.
This includes when you search something in a search engine and the first few links that come up say “Ad” in bold next to the link.
Paid traffic is also from advertisements on social media, like when you see ads scrolling on Instagram or add banners on other websites that you might have paid to have.
To tie paid traffic and backlinking together, non-organic traffic is traffic that comes from paid advertising, backlink availability and other means in which the user simply did not search anything themselves.
Conversions
Conversions are when users don’t just visit your website but they sign up to a mailing list, create an account, make a phone call, etc.
Find an SEO tool that can give you individual figures for each conversion aspect so you know exactly how users are responding.
How do I track my SEO?
You need to have a multi-metric tracking system to track your website’s metrics.
Some programs are free, some are paid in one payment, and some are paid monthly. They all have their own benefits and it might also depend on what you use the tracing tool on – eg, computer, tablet phone.
Programs used to track SEOs include:
- Google Analytics
- AgencyAnalytics
- Moz
- Ahrefs
- SEMRush
- KWFinder
- SpyFu
- Woorank
- Majestic
Contact iformat’s marketing team today!
If you need help finding the right tracking tool, reading your metrics, or if you’re new to online marketing and need help with the basics, then contact iformat.
We are a marketing company that helps a wide variety of businesses gain traffic online in Brisbane and Melbourne.
Call us on (03) 8842 1250 if you’re in Melbourne or on (07) 3732 6522 if you’re in Brisbane or fill out this form today!