So you are spending much time, sweat and money in improving your search engine rankings and traffic. You’ve hired a website design company and implemented your all new singing and dancing website. But how do you know if you are improving and showing good growth?
If you are an SEO consultant or if you work in-house for a company, you will need to report to your clients or your boss on a regular basis and provide them with data that they can understand.
Below you will find a brief description of just a few metrics that will help you to ascertain whether you are on the path to search engine success, or doomed to page 10 hell!
-Number Of Landing Pages
If you use Google Analytics or a similar analytics program you will be able to see how many unique landing pages visitors are hitting. Ideally, you will want to receive visits to many pages on your site rather than just the homepage. By creating consistent and regular well optimised content, you should see an increase in organic search traffic and an increase in the number of landing pages visitors are hitting directly.
-Number Of Unique Keywords
As you build more links and add more content to your site, you should notice that the number of unique keywords people are finding you with increases. More links, equals more page rank, deeper crawling and better indexing of your pages. The more pages you have indexed the more keywords you will be found with.
-Number Of Linking Domains
When it comes to SEO, link building is crucial. If you want to compete in competitive niches, you will need to manually create links and create good content that will attract natural links from other websites.
Many use the number of links as a metric to determine who well their link building is going but this is not the right thing to measure. The most important metric to measure is the number of unique linking domains as this represents a more detailed view of how popular your site has become.
-Number Of Pages Indexed
As mentioned previously, the more links you have, the more page rank will flow to your homepage and sub pages. More page rank means that Google especially will crawl deeper into your pages and index more of your content. This is good as the more content you have indexed the more long tail traffic you will attract.
-Number Of Branded Search Visits
Lastly, the number of branded search visits is a really important indicator of success. Brand recognition is the ultimate aim of any marketing campaign. By checking your analytics program over a period of time, you will hopefully find that more people are starting to find your site by typing in your brand name. This means your site is gaining greater mind share and overall visibility.