How do you measure SEO success?
Look at the Paris Olympics currently taking place, every single professional athlete taking part will tell you that they are constantly measuring their progress. Success can take months, sometimes years, and the same applies to your SEO success. You cannot expect overnight results. It takes time, dedication, and a lot of hard work, constantly perfecting your strategy, adjusting your strategy where necessary, to push yourself ahead and reach the top of search results.
In order to improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), you need an effective SEO strategy, focusing on creating high quality and unique content, driving organic and quality traffic to your website. In order to determine if your SEO strategy is effective or not, you will want to measure your success, identifying problems, and adjusting your strategy as and when needed.
There are a number of things you should be tracking to determine your SEO success. There is no “one-size-fits-all” measurement you can take. You need to consider ranking factors, ensuring your strategy aligns with SEO best practices:
Every SEO strategy includes keyword research and analysis, determining the target keywords you should be using to improve your ranking. With quality content published, using your selected keywords, you now need to measure how your site ranks by searching for the keywords. The SERPs will determine how you rank among your competitors.
Your goal should be to appear on the first page of results, taking into account that close to ninety nine percent of Google users only interact with the first page of SERPs, while only 0.63% will click onto the second page. Measuring your success, publishing high quality content, and measuring your keyword ranking will help you determine if your strategy is effective or not.
Organic website traffic is the number of visitors driven to your site after finding you during an online search. This is when a user has done a search on Google, Bing, or another top search engine, and the search engine has displayed your content. Google Analytics, a free online tool, is effective in helping you measure your organic website traffic, segmenting it into sources, such as what search engine the user was using when they found your site to what time of day they searched, to where they are located. This information shows you your returning and unique customers, helping you target your audience effectively.
It is important in today's digital age to drive traffic to your website, but it is just as important to get users to stay on your site, learning more about your brand and what you offer. Dwell time is a ranking factor and can help improve your rankings, reducing your bounce rate. In order to improve dwell time, create educational content, such as how to guides, also make use of infographics and videos. Videos and infographics are known to boost user engagement.
When your website appears in SERPs, you need to know how many people click on the link and are directed to your website. The number of users that click on your site is your CTR. When your website offers users the information that they need, your CTR will increase. This is why it's essential to write unique, high quality, relevant, and informative content. When you rank well in SERPs, you will see an increase in your CTR.
Bounce rates are also a ranking factor, it's when a user visits your website, but doesn't interact with any content. These users will come and go, they don't click on your links and spend a short amount of time on your page. High bounce rates can be a result of a poor user experience, or poor quality content.
When you have a high bounce rate, you know there are adjustments that must be made to your SEO strategy. It could be you need to publish relevant and useful content, or that your pages take too long to load. It could also be a result of poor website structure, showing that visitors cannot find the relevant information they were looking for, once they are on your website.
Measuring numerous factors is the best way to determine if your SEO strategy is successful or not. Remember when measuring your SEO success, to consider numerous factors, such as keyword ranking, organic website traffic, click-through rate, bounce rate, and dwell time.
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