How do you find out if your SEO strategy is working for your brand?
2022 is around the corner, and it’s time to evaluate your SEO strategies to find out if they actually work. You need to 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 important to find out 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 important to be great at your game.
Google regularly updates and changes its algorithms. So you need to make sure that your content stays on top when compared to your competitors. Are you wondering how to find out if your SEO strategy is working? This post will talk about the most important metrics to track and monitor SEO strategies. These will help you find out is your SEO strategy working for your brand or you need to do more.
1. 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. So, it absolutely makes sense to monitor the rankings of your website for those keywords.
You can opt to 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 to get a more thorough look at your website’s rankings, it’s better to use tools. Tools like SEMrush will give a comprehensive picture of 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 on a regular basis to monitor the changes in the visibility of your website.
2. Organic Traffic
When we ask the question – is your SEO strategy working for your brand, organic traffic is one of the most important metrics to measure the success of your SEO. 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. So, 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 more complete picture of your organic traffic.
3. Bounce Rate
Quality content is a vital aspect of your SEO strategies. So, to monitor if your content is working well for you or not, you need to measure your bounce rate. Your bounce rate is an excellent metric to find out if your website’s content is meeting the expectations of your visitors. Your bounce rate will be high if your visitors leave quickly and check out other pages from search results. This indicates that the page on which your visitors are landing doesn’t contain relevant information.
But if your bounce rate is low, it indicates that your web pages contain information that is relevant 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.
4. Domain Authority
Achieving a high Domain Authority is one of the important goals of SEO. However, it’s impossible to manually gauge the impact of the links earned on your website. So, there are tools like Website Authority Checker 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 your Domain Authority will help you find out if your SEO strategies are working or not. It will also help you build your website’s credibility.
5. Conversion Rates
Your conversion rate is also a crucial metric to measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategies to find out if they are working for your brand. Why? Because conversions are directly related to revenue generation.
One of the important 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 a very good conversion rate.
- Conversion Rate between 1% and 3% – If you own a non-eCommerce business, then the conversion rate within this range is good. 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.
6. Referring Domains and Backlinks
New backlinks and referring domains are two more metrics which 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 to one another, it’s still important to monitor each of them. 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 greater impact than links generated from websites that have already linked to you before.
To get an overall analysis of your link-building efforts, you need to monitor these two metrics. They will also help you find out if your SEO strategies are working or not.
If you are not monitoring these metrics yet, it’s time to do so.
7. 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 important to focus on the user experience you provide. The better the user experience is, the higher are your chances of converting a visitor into a customer. And an excellent user experience largely depends on how fast your web pages load.
So, it’s important that you optimize your web pages for speed. You need to check if any new changes you make to your website have an impact on the loading speed of your web pages. To monitor your page speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
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 aren’t well versed in these technical terms, you can just 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 then leverage this information, identify any issues, and improve the user experience even more.
8. Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate is one of the most effective metrics to understand if your SEO strategies are successfully working or not. It helps you understand how effectively your pages get the attention of users.
This also helps you analyze the quality of the meta descriptions and title tags of your web pages. These two important elements appear along with your web pages in search engine results. And based on these elements, users decide whether to visit your web page or not.
So, you might need to work on your meta descriptions and title tags if your click-through rate is low.
9. Pages Per Session
Pages per session is 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.
If the number of pages per session is high, then it indicates that visitors are checking out multiple pages on your website. And if the count is low, it indicates that your website content is not engaging and interesting enough for users to check out. It can also indicate that your website navigation is not up to the mark. Poor navigation can push users away from your website as they might not be able to find new content.
But how are you going to measure pages per session? Simple. You can use Google Analytics for this.
10. Local Visibility
It’s very important to track local visibility if you are managing local SEO campaigns. It’s one of the most effective metrics to find out if your SEO strategies are actually working or not. You need to monitor the following metrics to make sure 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.
Is Your SEO Strategy Working for Your Brand? – 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 that you do so. You can use tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, or Google Search Console to make the process easy and effective. Controlling the metrics discussed above will help you find out is your SEO strategy working for your brand or not.
