HOW TO FIND OUT IF YOUR SEO STRATEGY IS WORKING FOR YOUR BRAND
2023 is around the corner, and it’s time to evaluate your SEO strategies to find out if they actually work. You must be ready with your updated and improved SEO strategies for the upcoming year.
Since you invest a good amount of your time and resources into SEO, it’s essential to determine if your strategies are actually working. This will help you allocate your resources more effectively. SEO is a continuous and ongoing process, so it’s essential to be great at your game.
Google regularly updates and changes its algorithms. So you must ensure that your content stays on top compared to your competitors.
How do you find out if your SEO strategy is working?
This post will discuss the most important metrics for tracking and monitoring SEO strategies. These will help you find out if your SEO strategies are actually working or not.
Keyword Rankings
This is one of the most straightforward metrics to track the performance of your SEO strategies. Your aim is to improve the rankings of your website by using keywords relevant to your business. It absolutely makes sense to monitor the rankings of your website for those keywords.
You can do a simple Google search manually for the most important keywords. The results will show you the position of your website on search engines.
But if you want a more thorough look at your website’s rankings, it’s better to use tools. Tools like SEMrush will comprehensively picture your website’s ranking for all the keywords.
The Organic Search Position report of the tool will give you a summary of all keywords. The summary will include the positions of the keywords in which they rank. Use these reports regularly to monitor the changes in the visibility of your website.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is one of the most important metrics to measure the success of your SEO strategies. To understand your website’s general performance, you can refer to the overall traffic numbers. But the organic traffic data will show you the direct impact of SEO strategies on your website.
Remember, the main goal of SEO is to increase your website’s visibility. If your SEO strategies are working, then the number of visitors to your website should increase.
You can use Google Analytics to collect organic traffic data. Navigate to “Acquisition” to select “Overview” and then select “Organic Search.”
The acquisition report gives you the monthly organic traffic generated for your website. The monthly reports will help you understand the impact of your SEO strategies. You can also set a time frame to get a complete picture of your organic traffic.
Bounce Rate
Quality content is a vital aspect of your SEO strategies. So, to monitor if your content is working well for you, you need to measure your bounce rate.
Your bounce rate is an excellent metric to determine if your website’s content meets visitors’ expectations.
Your bounce rate will be high if your visitors leave quickly and check out other pages from search results. This indicates that the page your visitors are landing must contain relevant information.
But if your bounce rate is low, it indicates that your web pages contain relevant information to your visitors. This can help your web pages secure top ranks in search engine results and help you achieve your SEO goals.
Below is the general breakdown of bounce rates:
- Bounce Rate of less than 30% – Excellent!
- Bounce Rate between 35% and 60% – This is average performance, so there’s no need to worry. But you should find ways to improve the content on your web pages.
- Bounce Rate 70% or above – This is really high. You need to evaluate your website and, if required, hire a professional to help you.
Domain Authority
Achieving a high Domain Authority is one of the crucial goals of SEO. However, it’s impossible to manually gauge the impact of the links earned on your website. So, there are tools like this free Website Authority Checker from AHREFs (check out some of their other free tools)to make the process simpler and more convenient.
It’s easy to use. All you have to do is enter your domain name. And the tool will rate your site on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher the number, the higher your Domain Authority.
Constant monitoring of your Domain Authority will help you determine whether your SEO strategies are working. It will also help you build your website’s credibility.
Conversion Rates
Your conversion rate is also crucial for measuring your SEO strategies’ effectiveness to determine if they work for your brand. Why? Because conversions are directly related to revenue generation.
One of the crucial goals of SEO is to generate quality leads and increase sales. So, without a doubt, it’s an important metric to measure the overall success of your SEO strategies.
You can use Google Analytics and set up custom goals to measure conversions. You can set up goals for email newsletter signups, lead form submissions, or online purchases. Or you can set up any sort of goal that is a conversion for your business.
This will help you track the actions taken by your website visitors. Based on this, you can make the required changes to achieve your goals.
The general breakdown for conversion rates:
- Conversion Rate of 3.5% or above – Awesome! This is an excellent conversion rate.
- Conversion Rate between 1% and 3% – If you own a non-eCommerce business, the conversion rate within this range is reasonable. But there’s still scope for improvement.
- Conversion Rate between 0% and 1% – If your website conversion rate is 1% or below, you need to pull up your socks because you are losing high-quality leads. If required, hire a professional for help.
Referring to Domains and Backlinks
New backlinks and referring domains are two more metrics you need to measure along with Domain Authority. New backlinks include all new links to your website that you have gained. And referring domains are the domains from which you get new backlinks.
Although these metrics may seem related, monitoring each of them is still essential. You can use Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker tool to successfully monitor these metrics.
Every new backlink you earn has a positive impact on increasing your Domain Authority. However, getting backlinks from new, high-authority domains will have a more significant effect than links from websites already linked to you.
You need to monitor these two metrics to get an overall analysis of your link-building efforts. They will also help you determine whether your SEO strategies are working.
If you still need to monitor these metrics, it’s time to do so.
Page Speed
Page speed is an important metric to be analyzed when you want to check the performance of your SEO strategies. To improve your search engine rankings, it’s essential to focus on the user experience you provide. The better the user experience, the higher your chances of converting a visitor into a customer. And an excellent user experience largely depends on how fast your web pages load.
So, you must optimize your web pages for speed. You need to check if any new changes you make to your website impact the loading speed of your web pages. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to monitor your page speed.
This tool will help you monitor some of the technical aspects of your web page, including the upload time in DCL and FCP. But if you need to be better versed in these technical terms, you can measure against the optimization score from Google.
Either way, it will give you a fair understanding of the loading time of your web pages. You can leverage this information, identify issues, and improve the user experience.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate is one of the most influential metrics to understand whether your SEO strategies are working successfully. It helps you know how effectively your pages get the attention of users.
This also helps you analyze the quality of your web page meta descriptions and title tags. These two essential elements appear along your web pages in search engine results. And based on these elements, users decide whether to visit your web page.
If your click-through rate is low, you should work on your meta descriptions and title tags.
Pages Per Session
Pages per session are another effective indicator to measure the success of your SEO strategies. This metric indicates the effectiveness of your site funnel and navigation and how engaging your website content is.
Suppose the number of pages per session is high. In that case, it indicates that visitors are checking out multiple pages on your website. And if the count is low, your website content needs to be more engaging and exciting enough for users to check out.
It can also indicate that your website navigation needs to be better. Poor navigation can push users away from your website, as they might need help finding new content.
But how are you going to measure pages per session? Simple. You can use Google Analytics for this.
Local Visibility
You must track local visibility if you are managing local SEO campaigns. It’s one of the most influential metrics to determine if your SEO strategies are working.
You need to monitor the following metrics to ensure that organic traffic is generated from the right audience.
Session Location
- You need to identify the exact location from where your web sessions originate. This will help you evaluate your website’s local traffic.
Google Maps Rankings
- You need to find a rank tracker tool to track your Google Map rankings for your business.
Google My Business (GMB) Insights
- You need to set up GMB Insights to monitor how frequently your business page appears in local search results.
Final Thoughts
These are a few of the most important metrics to measure the success of your SEO strategies. The results will also guide you in designing more effective SEO strategies for next year.
If you don’t track your SEO performance, it’s high time you do so. You can use tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, or Google Search Console to make the process easy and effective.
Do you know other ways to determine if your SEO strategy is working? Let us know in the comments below.