SEO experts will tell you that tracking information about referrals, ranking,and links is crucial to analysing your campaign and enjoying the ride on the road to success.Although every business is unique and SEO should be carefully tailored to each venture,we believe that some things are universal, and that our 5 tips for measuring and tracking SEO success will appeal to any of you with a vested interest in the subject.It’s not just for reference;our list of tips should help you to improve your site and keep things fresh.So,what should you be tracking?
1.Share Of Visitors From Different Search Engines
Knowing exact numbers and percentages when it comes to visitors arriving from different sources will enable you to identify strengths and weaknesses and compare trends over time. In a broad sense, you should be monitoring direct navigation from anything typed in by a user, referral traffic from links, and traffic brought to you via search engines. This data can be used to track successes (or failures!) and learn about trends in the market place.
2.Visits From Specific Search Engines
Measuring the numbers of visitors from each of the different search engines is extremely useful for a variety of reasons. You can learn a lot about visitors to your site through knowing which country they are in and which search engine they are using to find you. Knowledge is power, and if you find that your demographic is coming mainly from one source, for example, you can target your customers more effectively. This is to say nothing of the potential benefits in SEO terms. As search engine optimisation specialists will tell you, the algorithms used by different search engines to determine your rank vary. It’s very possible that information about where visitors to your site come from could lead you to target one search engine over others with your website optimisation.
3.Keywords, Terms, Phrases
You’ll definitely want to keep track of the words or phrases that are leading visitors to your site through searches. By doing this you can make necessary changes in the way you feature them on your site and learn about trends in the marketplace. As with the other tips on monitoring featured here, you should be meticulous in your gathering of data and maintain it regularly. A free SEO analysis might help you to maximise the benefit you can get from the information you gather.
4.Conversion Rates
You’ll definitely want to monitor and record the number of visitors to your site who actually become clients. This is marketing strategy at its most basic. Learn how much of your profits are coming from searches. Learn where the ‘best’ visitors are coming from and target accordingly. You can also learn a lot from the keywords that are used by visitors who become clients. Refining your choice of keywords might just give you the edge you’ve been looking for.
5.Number Of Pages On Your Site That Receive At Least One ‘Hit’ From Search Engines
Search engine optimisation specialists agree that learning about the quantity of pages receiving traffic through Internet searches offers a key metric when it comes to measuring general SEO performance. Using this number we can get a glimpse of our indexation, i.e. the number of pages from our site being kept in the search engine indexes. And perhaps more importantly, we get a glimpse into trends and how they change over time.
For the majority of big sites, inclusion itself is essential for earning traffic. As you work on website optimisation techniques such as link acquisition, fresh content, sitemaps, architecture, and Meta data you should see the numbers rise as more and more pages earn their places on results pages. In this way you can monitor your progress and discover exactly what’s working best for you. You might also find some areas that need extra attention.
Other trends are worth analysing too, but we think that the five looked at here will be useful across the board. Get the most from your website optimisation by keeping a close eye on what’s happening as a result of your efforts. Checking the figures we’ve talked about here will remind you of the need to constantly monitor and improve your search engine optimisation strategy. You’ll learn how well risks you’ve taken have worked out and what to avoid. You’ll also learn what worked so that you’ll know to keep doing it.