It can be a lot of work to stand out as a small business in this day and age. While the internet has provided a way to access potential customers like never before, it also requires finding a way to stand out from the endless wave of content that is hitting viewers’ feeds.
If you’re smart, you’ve already put some kind of SEO strategy in place that helps to get your website above others on online search results. However, what you may not have thought of is how best to manage SEO tracking.
Tracking your SEO results can help you determine if your current strategy is working, and what changes you can make to better your results. This is essential no matter what kind of business you run.
How can you track and monitor this type of progress? Read on and we’ll walk you through what you need to know about SEO keyword tracking.
Importance of SEO Tracking
Business owners of all kinds put a lot of time, effort, and money into executing a strong SEO strategy. Having a solid strategy in place is deeply important, however, so is ensuring this kind of strategy is creating tangible results.
If you aren’t tracking your SEO performance, you’re leaving a lot up to chance. You want to know that your money and effort are leading towards the goals that you had in mind at the start of this marketing process.
There’s no way to do that without engaging in some level of SEO tracking. By looking to the right performance metrics, you can get a sense of how effective your efforts thus far have been.
Knowing which metrics to look at, and having the proper tools at your disposal to analyze them, can make a world of difference. The data you gather from this process will help you feel more secure in your current strategy or will allow you to focus on problem areas and hone in your strategy for better results.
Key Metrics to Look Out For
If you’re going to sit down and start looking at the success or failure of your SEO efforts, what metrics are going to be the most important to consider?
There are a number of them that are worth considering for your website.
Organic Traffic
This can be an important metric to consider in light of your current SEO strategy. This metric allows you to see how many visitors arrive at your website via organic search results.
This is one of the most straightforward metrics to consider, as it is directly related to what the goal of your SEO strategy is: to get people to come to your website.
The idea is that the more you fine-tune your SEO strategy, the more you’ll see the rate of your organic traffic rise. If you’re not seeing a marked increase in the number of organic visitors after deploying your strategy, it should be a sign of concern.
It will mean that you may need to rethink your strategy entirely.
Measuring organic traffic can be done with a number of tools. This kind of information can be easily accessed through Google Analytics, for example. There are also a number of other SEO tools out there that will allow you to dig into this kind of work, you can click here to learn more.
Search Engine Ranking
The main idea behind many SEO strategies is getting your website to rank higher in the results that come to web viewers. The idea is this higher ranking will lead to more organic traffic.
Looking directly at your current search engine ranking can give you a sense of how you are doing in achieving this goal. In fact, search engine ranking is one of the most essential marketing KPIs.
Of course, the challenge of measuring and learning from search engine rankings is that your ranking will be different for every keyword a web user might use. You might rank very high for a certain keyword and much lower for another.
This all can be very difficult to keep track of. This is where the importance of high-quality SEO measuring tools comes in. Most SEO management tools will allow you to input a long list of keywords and track your current ranking all in one easy-to-explore layout.
Link Quality Score
We all know that linking and backlinking are essential to an overall SEO strategy. However, getting more links doesn’t always mean that your link quality score is increasing. Low-quality linkage can actually bring your site’s score down in the eyes of the major search engines.
Keeping an eye on your link quality score can help you determine if work needs to be done in the area of link building.
If your score is lackluster, it will be impacting your ranking and thus your level of organic traffic as well.
Bounce Rate & Average Session Duration
The point of getting users to your website is to get them to engage with you as a business or brand. For this reason, it’s important to get a sense of what a visitor to your webpage does.
You can learn this by getting a look at your bounce rate and the average session duration of a visitor.
How long does a viewer stay and do they take any action? If these stats are low, it might be an indication changes to your website need to be made.
SEO Tracking Tips and Tricks
If you’re looking to better your SEO results, you’ll need to know how to track your success as compared to your goals. The above SEO tracking information can help you determine how best to accomplish this task.
Need more tips for SEO and online marketing? Keep scrolling our blog for more.
