Have you put time and effort into your business’s SEO strategy? If so, you likely want to know if all this hard work is paying off. While it can be challenging to learn how to monitor SEO performance, it is not impossible.
It doesn’t matter if you are using a private cloud, public cloud, visibility cloud, or another type of hosting solution, you will find that your efforts to ensure your website is found may fall flat if you don’t track and monitor your SEO efforts. Some tips to help you with this can be found below.
Use Google Analytics to Track the Top Metrics
There are several important metrics you should track every month to know what is working and what isn’t. These metrics include the total number of pages that are visited, time on site, click-through rate, and bounce rate. They are going to provide you with a quick overview of the posts and pages on your site that are doing well, and why. You can use this insight to help revive your older content or to create new content.
It is important to remember that Google appreciates your efforts to update old content and it likes new content. Also, Google crawls your site often, so if you are regularly feeding it new or improved content, it will continue to benefit your rankings in search results.
Track the Rankings for Certain Keyword Phrases
The goal of your SEO efforts is likely to gain more traffic. Making sure that you choose the right keyword phrases for your blogs and articles and answering all queries while fulfilling user intent is the fastest way to make sure this happens.
When you use the right keyword phrases, you will begin to rank in Google for the specified term, along with related terms. The increase in rankings can result in more traffic, too. However, there are some situations when it doesn’t. To know if your keyword research is working or if it is not working, you have to track your rankings.
When you know what your rank is for certain keyword phrases, it will help you determine if you are on the right track, if you must do more work to your posts to help boost it further, or if you have selected a dud that should be changed completely. It will also give you prime opportunities to get more traffic from any post that is not yet optimized with the right keywords.
One of the easiest and fastest ways for you to see what your rank is for a certain keyword phrase is by looking in the Google Search Console or in Google Analytics.
What Percentage of Your Traffic Comes from Organic Search?
It may be tempting for you to celebrate or even blame your SEO efforts each time you have a spike or a dip in your traffic. However, unless you are actively monitoring your traffic from organic search, there is no way to tell if it is because of SEO.
Conducting a once-monthly check on your traffic sources is going to let you know if you are losing or gaining organic traffic. This is a good indication of if your SEO efforts are really paying off. You can find this information in Google Analytics. When you navigate to the proper tab, you will find Organic, Referral, Direct, Social, and Other. The most important that you should look at is Organic Search. Be sure that at least a portion of your traffic is generated via this method. If it isn’t, you should work on adding more keywords that rank and on fulfilling user intent using your content.
Improving Your SEO Results
As you can see, there are several ways you can track your SEO. By tracking your efforts properly, you can feel confident that you will achieve better results for your site and you will know when changes need to be made.
Guest article by Kevin Gardner
Kevin Gardner graduated with a BS in Computer Science and an MBA from UCLA. He works as a business consultant for InnovateBTS where he helps companies integrate technology to improve performance.