It can feel impossible to run a successful SEO campaign. SEO has become a $65 billion industry. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend a billion dollars hiring people to handle it for you.
A lot of people feel like they don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to drinking wine. And telling the difference between different SEO strategies can be just as hard for the uninitiated as telling the difference between a cabernet and a pinot noir.
The worst thing that you can do for your campaign is measuring the wrong metrics. Instead of misinforming yourself and falling behind, you should actually know what you’re doing.
Following these tips will take you far.
Keyword Rankings Are Number One
Keyword rankings are the most important part of your SEO campaign. That’s because when you measure them, you’re taking into account exactly what SEO was invented for.
Simply put, you want to make sure that when people search for what your company does, they find you.
If you’re not measuring this statistic, you might as well throw your entire SEO campaign out the window. Because the rest of your work will fall apart.
This strategy starts with keyword research. You should look for information about exactly what people are searching: this will help you plan your own keywords.
After this, you should look at the rules on different search engines. It’s a great idea to pack your page with keywords.
But if you do it too much, you’ll end up with a serious penalty for keyword stuffing.
There’s a lot of homework to do before you begin looking into your keyword rankings. But by the time you start hunting for results, it should be extremely easy to see how well you’re doing.
Measure Your Organic Traffic From Searches
Keyword rankings are important. But an SEO campaign is worth nothing if it isn’t getting clicks. While PPC and paid search advertising can help you get results, there’s nothing better than an old-fashioned organic click.
You may think this the same thing as measuring your keyword rankings.
But while you can’t get the clicks you need without ranking well for a particular keyword, you can also have a pretty good ranking without being able to turn links into clicks.
It’s incredibly important to develop a smart and successful strategy for bringing in organic clicks.
And you simply can’t do this without measuring your organic traffic. There are a number of ways to measure this, including through the information you can get from a rank tracker and website analytics tools.
If you aren’t measuring organic traffic, you simply do not have an SEO campaign.
Make sure you take advantage of the information you have available to develop your strategy for different keywords.
Check The Average Time Spent On Your Page
Developing compelling content is an important part of an SEO strategy. This works in two ways. The first is the fact that Google likely takes user interest and on-page time into account when ranking your page.
Chances are, if people search for a keyword, click on your page, then leave and click on something else, your ranking will suffer.
More important is conversions. You cannot boost your conversion rate if people are leaving your page.
If somebody doesn’t spend enough time on your site to read an article, they won’t spend enough time on your site to buy a good or service.
If that’s the case, there’s not only a lack of purpose in an SEO campaign: there’s also no point in an online presence. If you get lost in clicks and page views, you can forget why you need those things.
The first step to getting people to spend money on your site is getting them to spend time on it.
So make sure you develop compelling content and measure how long people are spending on your page.
Look For Returning Users
Getting people to come to your page once is important. But it isn’t just for short-term visitors. It’s about long-term returns. In that respect, you need a solid strategy that makes visitor returns inevitably.
If you’re creating compelling content and selling ad space on a blog, having a large number of returning users can make it easy to bring in advertisers.
If you’re trying to sell a product or service, having returning visitors to your site can be a great way to increase brand loyalty.
Either way, returning users and visitors is absolutely essential to your SEO campaign. You can measure it using the SEO crawler website analytics tool, and absolutely should!
Business Insider has made it clear just how valuable returning users are to online retailers, particularly compared to new ones.
It may seem that both of these demographics have equal value, or even that it’s more important to bring in new eyes.
But the reality is different. Returning users are twice as likely to buy something than new ones are. So don’t just keep ’em coming — keep ’em coming back.
Check Your Conversions
The bread-and-butter of any online retailer is their conversion rate. It may seem easy to get clicks. But it’s a lot harder to turn clicks into cash.
Looking at your conversion rate is the best way to be honest with yourself about your SEO campaign.
Because if you have high keyword rankings, a large number of new users, and almost nobody purchasing anything then you need to make a change.
As a part of your SEO campaign, you should compare purchase numbers and other business statistics as the number of clicks your website is getting. If you think this element of your campaign is lacking then there are some simple changes that you can make.
Things like improving the CTA of your website and offering seasonal deals, along with tailoring the keyword planning of your SEO campaign to searches based on the products you sell, can go a long way towards helping you bring in more money.
It’s essential that your business has a high conversion rate. So make sure you keep an eye on this statistic.
Check Your Backlinks
The backlinks of your SEO campaign should be measured in two ways. The first is quality, the second is quantity.
In the old days, people could get whatever backlinks they wanted. As long as there was a page linking to their website, it would benefit their campaign.
This lead to a link-based industry — websites that did not create content would host large databases of purchased links, and these links would give a company better rankings.
Eventually, this plan fell apart. Search engines started to measure the quality of backlinks, and websites that had these low-quality links going to their site would find themselves penalized.
You can still purchase backlinks, but you need to purchase smart and high-quality links to develop the successful campaign you need. If you have an older website there can also be bad links to your site that you don’t know about.
Make sure you aren’t being punished by bad backlinks. Also, make sure that you aren’t being weakened by not having enough.
Use a backlinks explorer to really understand how well your website is doing on this incredibly important metric.
Understand Your Loading Speed
You might think of loading speed as just a technical endeavor. But search engines care about sending their visitors to a website that works.
If you want to develop a solid SEO campaign, you need a website that loads quickly and performs well.
Finding out your loading speed can be more difficult than it seems.
If you have a computer or internet provider that is particularly slow, you may not realize how well or poorly your website is handling its loading speeds.
This why you should use tools to check how quickly your site loads. There are a number of good options available for this task. But something as simple as a site auditor can make this information easy to learn more about.
You can never build a successful SEO campaign around a slow website. So make sure you build something fast.
If you don’t know what’s working (and more importantly, what isn’t) you can never have the online success you need.
Measure 404 Page Views
Let’s say that you have a lot of people searching for your keyword. Many of them may even find your site.
They go through their search query, get down to your link, and click on it. They have their mouses in one hand their credit card in the other, and because of your solid SEO strategy, you can finally profit off of months of link checking, site improvements, and keyword planning.
Then, they hit a 404 page. Uh-oh.
404 pages are kryptonite to making a profit online. They can make it nearly impossible to get views, and even break the trust of potential visitors.
While these pages tell people to try to find a different way to the page, or even just to reload, what happens is far different.
When most people find out the content they want is unavailable, they find that content somewhere else. And if that’s the case, you’re delivering customers straight into the hand of your competition.
You need to build an SEO campaign that works. Part of that involves bringing people to your website, and not your 404 page.
Make sure you measure the number of people who seek out your website and can’t get there: this can be essential to building a successful strategy.
Desktop and Mobile Traffic
The internet is very different in 2017 than it was in any other year. In the past, mobile views didn’t really matter. Web browsers on flip phones were far more of a novelty than a practical endeavor.
Even when the first smartphones came out, there was no real reason to take mobile traffic that seriously.
Back then, only the extremely wealthy or extremely tech-savvy had these devices. Most people were sticking with the flip phones that shaped our conception of what a cellular device was.
But times have changed. Roughly 56 percent of online browsers today come to your website from a mobile device. If you want to make money, you need mobile traffic. This why you should try to figure out how many of your visitors are coming from each device.
SEO is important regardless of technology. But mobile SEO involves different techniques than traditional SEO. Knowing where your visitors are coming from is the first step to pulling this off.
See How The Competition Is Doing
Every SEO campaign is about competing. There are a limited number of searches and clicks for each keyword. If you aren’t getting these results, then somebody else is.
But how can you compete if you don’t know who you’re up against? There are a lot of ways to measure the competition when it comes to your SEO strategy. But one of the best is using competitor inspection tools.
These tools can help you learn a lot about your competition’s strengths and weaknesses.
Everything from their traffic and conversions to their rankings and visibility can be measured. And when you also have this information on yourself, you can measure your SEO campaign against theirs.
All’s fair in love and marketing. So make sure you do some sneaky spying to know exactly how to edge out the competition.
Get Data On Your SEO Campaign
You need the right tools to get the SEO information you need. There are a number of great options available for you to do this.
But if you want an affordable, all-in-one package or somebody looking to manage their own SEO campaign, you should work with us.
Whether you want to measure your rankings, look at your backlinks, or check out what the competition is up to, we’re willing to help.
