How do you measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy? The important thing to understand about search engine optimisation (or SEO) is that there is not one key activity that can boost the SEO of your site. It’s a mixture of activities that collectively improve it, a bit like cooking, it is a whole list of ingredients that make your favourite meal taste the way it does.
So how can you be sure whether your SEO strategy is working? Like with all digital marketing, monitoring and adapting to changes are key to its success. Let’s take a look at three metrics that can tell you if your SEO strategy is effective.
Evaluate your site’s usage & traffic
Using an analytics tools such as Google Analytics monitor your websites usages and traffic on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Recording your findings on a regular basis will provide you with comparative data. This will help you make adjustments to your SEO strategy to improve results.
Evaluating your site’s usage and traffic will allow you to see whether your organic traffic (unpaid traffic from search engines) has increased over time. You can find out; what your bounce rate is; how many users are accessing your site on mobile devices; where your website visitors are geographically located etc.
Evaluate Your Search Queries
Look at the search queries that are driving traffic to your site. See how your site ranks for those queries. You can do this in Google Analytics by selecting ‘Acquisition and the selecting ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. If you sort the page by ‘Average Position’ you will see the average search engine results page position for the queries that are driving traffic to your site.
The queries with lower positions indicate that there may be opportunities for you to improve the ranking of those keywords – if you improve your site’s content around those specific terms.
Landing Pages
It’s important to evaluate how your organic landing pages are performing. For example, if they have a high bounce rate (which is an indicator of low page or site quality to search engines). A high bounce rate can negatively impact your site’s SEO. To view a simple list of your top organic landing pages in Google Analytics, go to ‘Acquisition,’ select ‘Search Engine Optimisation,’ and select ‘Landing Pages.’ If you identify organic landing pages with high bounce rates, look at improving the content and/or user experience on those pages.
One of the most key factors of a successful SEO strategy is understand your audience and what they are looking for and commit to developing quality content that your audience will find relevant and interesting. If you have any questions about SEO get in touch on 01527 517309 or fill in our contact form.