Key metrics to help measure your SEO success

31
May

When it comes to performing well online, your website needs to be fully optimised for search engines to “crawl” and index. Otherwise you will be missing out on a lot of organic traffic, and potential sales. But once you have made all the necessary on page and off page SEO adaptations, how will you know your efforts have been successful? This is where analyzing the necessary data becomes important. But which metrics will provide the right data? And what should you even be looking for? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web marketing and web design experts. And we work with companies and businesses across the region to provide top quality web solutions. And this includes Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). As a result, we have produced this guide to the key metrics to help measure your SEO success.

Measuring the traffic directly related to the SEO

One of the most important key metrics to help measure your SEO success, is the SEO traffic. This is essentially the amount of traffic your website is receiving from search engines. And if you have worked on off page SEO, by setting up Google My Business listings, and other review sites, you can also include the traffic from these sources as well. However, while setting up a business Facebook account can help SEO, traffic from social media sites should be used to identify how well your social media is performing, not how well your SEO is performing.

If your website SEO has been successful, you can expect a significant amount of traffic from these sources. However, if you are using any paid search engine marketing, through Google or another search engine, the results can be skewed. For this reason, you should break down the traffic into traffic for different pages, including:

  • the landing page or home pages
  • the blog pages
  • the product pages or services pages

This way, you will be able to see just how well different parts of your website are performing on search engines, and this will help you identify areas that might need improving.

Take a look at the Search Engine Results Page

While search engine rankings should never be used a stand alone measure to indicate success, they can be used in conjunction with long term research to indicate a trend or pattern in the performance of your website. After all, the more effort you put into making your website fully optimized for search engines, the higher your page should rank. In theory, anyway.

Aiming for the number one spot on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is crucial of course, when you consider the percentage of traffic that is secured by the number one result. However there are many factors that can influence the SERP, and these can prevent an accurate understanding of how well your website or page is performing. These factors include:

  • personalised results- different searchers will see different results based on their previous browsing habits. While this can put your website higher for previous customers, it can make it more difficult to attract the attention of new potential customers
  • local results- in a lot of cases, Google will display local results related to the searchers current location.
  • rich results- Google can pick and choose featured snippets and rich results at any moment. And these can alter the page rankings and change the way your page performs.

However, despite these differences, over time you can use the SERP to:

  • track and monitor keyword rankings and see how they change over time
  • monitor different SERP results for your home page- local results, personalised results and organic results

In summary

Combining the amount of SEO traffic, with the long term performance of your website pages on the SERP, you can begin to understand where your website is performing well, and then apply this to other pages. At the same time, it will also indicate areas of weakness, that once identified, can easily be rectified.

For more information about the key metrics to help measure your SEO success, get in touch with the professionals today, here at Pumpkin Web Design.

Pumpkin Web Design Ltd is a small and highly results driven digital agency working for like minded clients in Preston, Chorley, Southport, Blackburn, Burnley, Morecambe,Wigan, Manchester, London, Warrington, Blackpool, Lancaster, Leyland, Lytham St Annes, Bolton, Chester and the UK. Our services include web design, SEO, content marketing, video production, brand design and much more.