Search engine optimization is a critical factor in getting a website to rank well in SERPs. There are many strategies that webmasters use to improve rankings, but sometimes, results can take longer than hoped to show. Depending on your tactics, trying to improve rankings may feel like you’re getting nowhere. Therefore, to keep on track of how your SEO efforts are doing, you need to measure results as you go along. With that in mind, below are the best ways to measure your website’s SEO performance.
Keywords
Where your website ranks for its keywords can give you an indication of how well your SEO is going. You should have some target words that you want your site to rank well for, and if it doesn’t, you need to change your strategy!
Ultimately, you want the number of keywords that a website is ranked highly for to be continuously growing, showing that your site is gaining more authority and trust.
Backlinks
Backlinks are when another website links to pages on yours. The more backlinks you have, the more weight the website has in search engine rankings. However, not all backlinks are equal in quality, and bad links can actually harm your SEO efforts. You can find out whether a backlink is a high quality link or not by finding out about the website in question, such as what domain authority it is. You can do this by typing it into a domain checker such as Moz.
If your backlinks are not growing as well as you’d like, then try a new link building strategy to gain more quality backlinks, and you should get an improvement if the rankings.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the visitors that find your website through typing their search terms into a search engine. If they find your site in the list of results, then you are ranking for that particular search term. When your organic traffic grows, it is a good measurement of how well your website’s SEO is performing.
Financial Value
How much value is your SEO efforts providing? If your goal is to increase conversion rates and make sales through the visitors to your website, then measuring how much your conversion rate is improving (or not!) gives you an indicator of what strategies to keep and what to change.
Another factor is the financial costs of your SEO strategies. If you are spending money on an advertising campaign, yet it is not giving the result you expected, then you need to re-evaluate and change your plan of attack.
By measuring your SEO, it gives you an overall picture of how well your website is ranking in the search engines, but it also shows you what areas you need to improve. Because there are so many different factors that affect ranking, measuring performance is essential to developing the right strategies for continued success. Monitoring and measuring your SEO efforts, as well as being able to adapt and change quickly to improve the areas that are not doing well, will give you the edge for success.
