SEO is important in cybersecurity. Search engines heavily penalize compromised websites. So, in this post, we will show you how to measure SEO success.
Now that you have a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy in place…
Is it effective?
Are your efforts driving tangible results?
What steps can you take to enhance website performance?
You can answer all these questions and more by tracking the right goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
KPIs serve as the control system that enables online digital marketing agency professionals and you to identify which SEO tactics are effective and which are not.
The right KPIs help you avoid spending more money and time on something that isn’t driving the expected returns.
So, what KPIs do you need to track?
Table of Contents
Determine Your End Goals
The first step in tracking an SEO strategy is to identify actionable and specific SEO goals for guidance.
Plus, goals help you take intentional steps in every decision you make. Each technique or piece of content you publish can be measured against specific SEO goals to evaluate its success. The end goals provide you and your team with items to strive for.
However, determining the right SEO goals for your business can be challenging, so it is advisable to seek professional help.
With all that in mind, below are the top 10 SEO goals you can adapt to get the process moving:
- Increasing organic traffic by x percent
- Improving your website’s backlink profile
- Strengthening site domain authority
- Increasing page speed
- Diversifying traffic-generating webpages
- Capturing more featured snippets
- Decreasing bounce rate
- Boosting time visitors spend on pages
- Increasing the conversion of organic traffic
- Optimizing internal linking
Well-defined SEO goals ensure that you and your team move in the same direction. These goals serve as landmarks for achieving better results, helping you prioritize content types and strategies that drive business growth.
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Track Your Ranking
With over 85 percent of the share, Google Search is a dominant force in the search engine market.
Google has billions of web pages within its indexing system and uses the PageRank (PR) algorithm to ensure the ranking of each page—including those on your website. It is always a good idea to determine the PR of your site and understand where your competition stands, so you can position your webpages at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Initially, Google PR scores were publicly available through a toolbar. In 2016, the search giant removed the toolbar from public view, making it one of the secret ranking mechanisms Google uses.
While PageRank is no longer public, it exists—but you cannot measure it with a tool anymore.
PR is still one of Google’s most essential variables when determining website position in SERPs. Google uses PR to determine the most trusted material for each query.
By checking your site’s PR, you can get an idea of the website’s quality and the quantity of backlinks, as Google’s PR score is often based on the number of backlinks. To measure SEO success, you need to track your ranking.
While Google owns the PageRank trademark, other search engines use similar technology to determine the ranking of web pages in search result listings.
Professional SEO websites sometimes feature software platforms and tools that provide authority metrics. Such domain scores grade your site’s overall quality based on backlink data, organic search data, and traffic data.
Measure The Volume & Quality Of Traffic
Website traffic is the Number of visitors your site receives, making it an important metric for measuring SEO success.
In fact, without traffic, no one is reading, clicking, or signing up—so no purchases!
While you can measure traffic volume daily, what should you be looking for, and how do providers like Ardor’s guarantee SEO services ensure you are achieving success?
No matter your goals, it is critical you know where you stand. This means diving into your site’s statistics to determine how much traffic is coming in, where it’s coming from, and how it engages with your content.
The standard tool for analyzing your website traffic is Google Analytics.
When connected directly to your business’ website, Google Analytics provides you with the Number of visitors coming to your site, where they are from, and how they interact with it.
Some data to pay attention to include:
- Unique visitors — The Number of people visiting your site for the first time within a select date range
- Pageviews — The Number of pages visitors view on the website within a specified date range
- Organic search traffic — Count of visitors on your site coming from search engines, including Google
- Other traffic channels — Visitors on your site from channels such as YouTube and Facebook and referrals from other websites
Google Analytics provides you with more statistics, but these are the main ones that will help you analyze the Number of visitors to your site.
Next, check on the quality of traffic using engagement metrics.
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Analyze Your Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics provide valuable insights into what visitors find popular and what they do not.
Metrics are critical in measuring SEO success and shaping the roadmap in the future. Whether you are trying to determine which functionality is most frequently used or pinpoint exactly when website visitors click away from your homepage, engagement metrics are essential for shaping your SEO strategy and product.
A professional online digital marketing agency will measure and track user engagement in many ways. Below is a quick list of the top five engagement metrics to watch.
1. Time on page
This metric is useful for tracking the average time visitors spend on your website.
The average session duration is critical for measuring user engagement. The metric helps you assess site quality and understand what changes you should make to the website’s structure.
To increase the average time on the page, consider incorporating a deep content structure using internal linking, hamburger menus, breadcrumbs, and other website design elements.
2. Conversion rate
There may be specific actions you want visitors to take within a page, such as purchasing a product, opening a specific page, or signing up for a service. The actions are tracked as conversions, providing a solid way of demonstrating SEO success. Plus, an increase in organic conversions is easily attributable to the efforts an SEO marketing service is implementing.
Determine the conversion rate by dividing the Number of visitors completing actions by the total Number of visitors.
Conversion rate = Number of visitors who complete the action / total number of visitors
However, you must have a conversion benchmark before working on a specific campaign. Not doing so makes it hard to show an increase in what you generate.
Professionals at Google SEO companies recommend taking the conversion average of three months before the campaign rollout and using it as the benchmark for growth measurement.
3. Bounce rate
Use this metric to determine the percentage of website visitors who bounce from your site without taking any action.
Search engines consider bounce rate as a ranking factor. The standard bounce rate should be between 40% and 60%, depending on the industry. A percentage that is too high indicates that the specific page is not relevant to a search query, resulting in missed opportunities to convert traffic.
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4. Pages per visit (pages/visit)
This metric measures the Number of web pages a site visitor or groups of visitors view on a single visit.
The pages-per-visit rate is typically highlighted as the average number of page views divided by the total Number of visitors. You can further break down the metric by country, region, or demographic.
Many pages per visit typically indicate that the content on the webpage is relevant and interesting enough to warrant a fourth click—for example, articles on cybersecurity trends when selling online security tools for businesses. A low number of pages visited per session suggests that you lack content or that navigation is difficult for visitors.
5. Scroll depth
Are visitors reading your content?
By tracking page scroll depth, you can see exactly how much your visitors are reading so you can take action. For example, if nearly 20 percent of visitors read all your content and over 60 percent read about half of it, you have “sticky” content.
Even better, when 40 percent of readers stop at the 50 percent mark of your content, you can determine to implement steps to improve readership. Perhaps insert an image at the position to pull them further down. You could even insert a link to related content if they stop reading at the mark anyway—maybe even add a Call to Action button.
Examine Your Backlinks’ Quality
Quality backlinks come from high-domain authority websites that searchers and search engines trust.
They are intrinsically beneficial for SEO rankings and domain authority. With quality backlinks, you don’t have to worry about hurting your rankings by creating unintentional relationships with spam websites. Plus, they are foolproof and trustworthy.
Assess the backlink quality for your site by:
- Identifying as many referring domains as possible via different backlinks data sources
- Doing a domain authority check for linking root domains
- Verify the use of optimized anchor texts
- Analyzing the naturalness of linking pages using deep backlink analysis
- Detecting backlinks social share magnitude
Know Your Website’s Domain Authority & Page Authority
Besides securing your website, knowing your Domain Authority (DA) is critical to measuring and ensuring success. DA is the search engine ranking score of how likely your entire domain or subdomain will rank on SERPs. The higher the scores, the better your website’s ranking ability.
Page Authority (PA) measures the strength of a single page on your website to rank on SERPs. Like DA, PA is calculated using a machine-learning algorithm to compare against other pages.
The Bottom Line
Tracking all available metrics at once can be a huge time waste. Instead, select sets of KPIs that align with the goals of your SEO project.
An online digital marketing agency can help automate the tracking process, saving you time and providing access to in-depth reports that measure your SEO success.
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About the Author:
Amaya Paucek is a professional with an MBA and practical experience in SEO and digital marketing. She is based in Philippines and specializes in helping businesses achieve their goals using her digital marketing skills. She is a keen observer of the ever-evolving digital landscape and looks forward to making a mark in the digital space.
