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Did you know that web users are 20 times more likely to click on organic search results over a paid ad? For this reason, implementing a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is crucial in expanding your online reach and ensuring your website gets the visibility it deserves.
However, it can be difficult to determine your strategy’s effectiveness unless you routinely monitor its progress and refine your approach along the way.
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of tracking your SEO progress and how to analyze your website’s data for further optimization. We’ll also explore the best ways to improve your overall strategy, so your website is poised for long-term success. Keep reading to learn more.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization – or SEO – refers to the process of enhancing your website across a variety of metrics in order to increase its visibility in search engines like Google. This way, whenever a web user searches for products, services, or topics related to your business, your website will be more likely to be found by relevant users.
Because the whole point is to drive organic traffic from search engines to your website, SEO is highly effective in helping you achieve your business goals and increase conversions and sales. In fact, 40% of all business revenue, on average, is generated by organic search.
A proper SEO strategy will involve optimizing your site’s technical components, such as URL structure and internal linking, as well as ensuring that all content is high-quality, authentic, and readable. You will also need to thoroughly research your target audience and identify valuable keywords and search terms for your website to appear in relevant searches.
Tracking Your SEO Progress
SEO is a continuous process that requires regular monitoring and improvement. In order to accurately measure your strategy’s progress, you will need to consistently track key metrics, such as:
- Organic Traffic: Simply put, organic traffic refers to the number of visitors your website garners from Google and other search engines. This is typically an excellent indicator of your overall SEO strategy, as a boost in organic traffic shows that your site ranks higher in search engines, meaning it’s more visible.
- Keyword Ranking: Keywords are essentially any word or phrase that a web user searches on Google or other search engines. In order to rank highly in search results for keywords, your website and all of its content will need to be optimized.
- Click-Through Rate: The percentage of users who click on your website from a search engine results page is known as a click-through rate (CTR). It can help you determine how effectively your title tags and meta descriptions attract visitors to your site.
- Bounce Rate: A bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit your site but leave quickly without any further engagement. This can reveal if your site is appealing to your target market.
- Page Speed: The speed of your page is also insightful, as it affects your website’s ranking, as well as your bounce and conversion rates. Ultimately, the longer your site takes to load, the more users you have leaving your site.
Setting SEO Goals
In addition to tracking these key metrics, you should plan to set goals and benchmarks for measuring your SEO progress. These goals should be specific objectives that you wish to accomplish over a certain period of time.
When setting these goals, it’s important to first determine your outcome goal or main objective that you wish to achieve, as well as your desired time frame for achieving it. From there, you can break your goal down into smaller performance goals, which can then be broken down even further into process goals.
The point here is to define a series of stepping stones that will enable your ultimate outcome goal to be more attainable.
Analyzing Your Data
SEO analytics involves collecting and evaluating your data to gain more insight into your site’s overall performance. If done properly, this will show which areas of your strategy could use improvement in order to achieve more visibility and rank higher on search engine results pages.
Here are some of the most popular types of SEO analysis:
- SEO Content Audit: This type of analysis consists of reviewing your website’s content to identify how it can be enhanced in order to garner more high-quality traffic. It will show if your search traffic has decreased on certain pages and which ones provide information that is proving to be valuable to web users.
- Site Audit: A site audit will evaluate the general performance of your website and then provide you with an overall health score. This will reveal if there are currently any issues with your strategy, give information on your keyword usage, and even present insight into your top competitors’ strategies.
- Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO involves analyzing different factors apart from your actual website that may be affecting your rankings in search engines. These factors include the quality and amount of your backlinks and how much traffic is actually coming from those links.
- On-Page SEO: This will mean optimizing the content on your site strategically in order to improve your search visibility and rankings. For this, you will need to thoroughly review your site’s content, as well as any headings, title tags, and internal link structure.
- Technical SEO: Analyzing your website’s technical SEO will ensure that you meet basic search engine criteria related to your website’s page loading time, dead links, duplicate content, and security.
While SEO analytics can be accomplished through simple actions like checking your page speed and Google visibility, it’s a good idea to also utilize tools to help ease the process.
Fortunately, there are many tools available that can be utilized to help ease the process of interpreting your data and determining which areas of your strategy require additional improvement. These include:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics can help you uncover traffic insights by allowing you to view traffic to your site by channel, as well as over a certain period of time. It will also show how many visits a particular page has received through its Site Content feature, which will enable you to evaluate the performance of any of your website’s pages within different date ranges.
This service will also help track your keyword rankings, show how engaged users are with your site, and measure your site speed and mobile-friendliness by showing how your site performs on different devices. You can even set up custom alerts regarding any changes in your site’s traffic.
Google Search Console
Focusing on search results, this Google service will provide a complete overview of your site’s SEO performance, help diagnose technical issues with your strategy, and ultimately improve your rankings in search results.
It enables you to access real-time data based on a variety of user experience-related metrics to help you better monitor your organic traffic and will give detailed reports of your website’s average click-through rate, top-performing pages, and keywords. It will also verify if your Core Web Vitals are performing properly and identify any usability issues with your mobile site.
Semrush
Semrush offers a comprehensive means of auditing your website, with more than 60 on-page and technical SEO checks available, as well as various ready-to-use templates for SEO-friendly content. Its SEO analysis tools will provide information into your competitor’s SEO strategies by uncovering their referring domains, the keywords they’re ranking for, and their main traffic sources.
This service also works great for keyword research and analysis, as it lets you access a table of vital metrics like volume trend, competition level, and SERP features and helps you discover related keyword suggestions. Additionally, Semrush gives detailed breakdowns of where your traffic is coming from, advice on improving your backlinks, and step-by-step instructions on how to further optimize your website.
Ahrefs
With Ahrefs, you will gain access to a variety of tools aimed at monitoring your site’s overall SEO health. This service will check for more than 100 common SEO issues, such as missing title tags and meta descriptions, broken links, slow pages, and duplicate content. These will not only be sorted by importance, but they will also even come with advice on how best to rectify each issue.
In addition to providing insights into your organic traffic, page speeds, and internal linking opportunities, Ahrefs offers a Content Gap tool that can be used to see which keywords your competitors are ranking for, ultimately revealing which search phrases are essential for your market. You can also easily schedule regular SEO checks to ensure your website remains in optimal condition.
Improving Your Performance
Now that you understand the importance of routinely measuring your SEO progress and which tools can be utilized to analyze your strategy, let’s take a look at how you can further boost your site’s performance and increase your search engine rankings.
UI/UX Upgrade
A great way to improve your SEO strategy’s overall performance is by enhancing your website’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). This means that your site should be visually appealing with an easy-to-use navigation structure so users who land on your page stay on your page. A proper UI/UX upgrade can go a long way in reducing your bounce rate and increasing user engagement, as users will be more likely to explore a website that’s designed as interesting yet uncomplicated.
Create Meaningful Content
Because a thorough SEO analysis will reveal what types of Google searches are bringing users to your website, you can create relevant content based on those queries. This will enable you to better target your audience, anticipate their wants and provide information related to exactly what they are looking for on your site.
Increase Mobile-Friendliness
Investing in optimizing the mobile experience of your website is a no-brainer, especially seeing as how 58% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. This will consist of creating a responsive website layout that can adapt to different screen sizes, improving your site speed, and adjusting the size of buttons and where they’re placed. You’ll also want to avoid using pop-ups, as they can be difficult to close and frustrating for mobile users.
Local SEO Optimization
After using data analytics tools to discover where your website visitors are located, you can then implement a local SEO strategy to target different areas where your users are located. This can be done by adding localized keywords and content and launching marketing campaigns aimed at nearby users of a specific area.
Boost Your SEO With Idea Maker
Still have questions about how to go about measuring the progress of your SEO strategy? Idea Maker is here to help! Our team of experienced developers, designers, and digital marketing specialists can walk you through the entire process, implementing custom improvements based on your needs. Schedule a consultation with us today to learn more about how our SEO services can help increase your online visibility and bring more visitors to your site.
