So, you have hired an SEO company to help you out and they have done some work and now it is time to get your first report. For this post on measuring your SEO, I am going to use a really cool site called Toad Web Sites, They are a Orlando web designer firm that has been around since 2000. Here are the things you should use ( or be told by your search engine optimization company) to measure.
SEO is about quality and having implemented a standard set of key performance indicators (KPIs) is not necessary but mandatory to your business being successful. SEO KPI’s are set for learning what works and where a site/domain can be improved.
Many people ask me if you need to be an expert in analytics to understand these essential SEO KPIs? Not at all. Really it comes down to simple marketing. So lets start with the specific search engine optimization KPIs:
SEO Landmark KPI’s
Total Organic Pages – A very straight forward straightforward metric that is a essential KPIs for SEO. Basically, the amount of pages visitors saw by organic searches that were done. For our example, this is could be the home page or a specific page that was dedicated for a specific service like search engine marketing . Knowing the number of pages that rank and are being found by search engine users provides insights into not only a website’s overall exposure but also reveals changes occurring in broader and even niche markets.
Most Trafficked Pages – Understanding which pages deliver the most search engine visitors provides you the insights into what can be optimized and which type of content can be expanded. For example, website designers is a popular term for our example site. Is this page designed for customer inquiries as best as it can be. You will be suprised what pages do well from an organic standpoint. Some times contact us, FAQ, or search result pages gain a lot of traffic. By having a good grip on your top pages it will give you what you need for next steps.
SEO Keywords Per Page – Keyword to web page is a very important KPI. Knowing if the SEO keyword phrase is a long tail or head term will help you understand the popularity of the topics and information needs of users interested – explore the conversion rate for top keywords and identify areas of improvement. Knowing the length of the keyword is a key indicator of the performance of long-tail SEO campaigns. This helps decision-makers understand the characteristics of the traffic. In our example, I have a screen shot of the about is page. It is nicely optimized for many terms such as Orlando Florida web design company. In our hypothetical research of our KPIs, we notice that this page is getting a good amount of organic traffic for this term. Does this page really talk to that person who used this keyword? Does it give the user a quick way to get more information or ask for a quote? These are some of the actionable items that stem from looking at this search engine optimization KPI.
Bounce Rate – Real quickly, a bounce is when somebody lands on a page and does not engage (form fillout, click to another page, ets.) before leaving the site. Now this is a very tricky metric as depending on the type of page you server the visitor such as a landing page or blog the bounce percentage can be very high (80% or above) yet be acceptable. A good rule of thumb is that any bounce percentage of 50% or higher should be analysed and re optimized. Search engines tend to have different demographic user profiles. I have seen over 90% of the time that Bing users convert higher than Google visitors. Problem is Bing does not give you the shear numbers that Google does.
New vs. Return Visitors – Another biggie as it provides information on the characteristics of the organic traffic. Our example site should be very high in new visitors with little return visitors. I would try to drive more return visitors by implementing a blog into the site. This will give people the reason to return while establishing the site as authority in Orlando web design.
Length of Visit – Both the duration and the average length of visits are high-quality benchmarks for organic/natural traffic. If you can identify the pages and content types/categories that have the lowest average length of stay (and want to improve that), many powerful conclusions can be drawn about the SEO process. Our example site should experience a high length of visit as it does a nice job of offering a portfolio and some of their SEO success for their clients. I would advise the example site to create inside pages for the portfolio sites and have a few hundred words within those pages to give the search engines more content and the ability to receive more rankings.
A very interesting and informative article.