Tips to Track Your SEO Performance
When you embark on your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign you will be entering into a new learning phase of your life. You have, no doubt, by this stage set up your very own website. You have included a good balance of images and text. You have produced eye catching headlines. The one thing you haven’t got is traffic to your site. SEO is what you now have to do to get visitors.
There is much more to SEO than simply scattering important keywords throughout your text and organising links. You will have to closely monitor the effect of these keywords and ascertain if the links are being productive or not. SEO is all about search engine rankings. This means you want to have your particular website ranked above that of your competitors when people search keywords associated with your products or services. It must at least make the search engine’s first page. This will be the aim of your keywords or key phrases.
Carefully Chosen Keywords are Important to Your Success
In this sense your choice of keywords is paramount to your ultimate success. You should therefore think about what words you would use if you wanted to bring up your own site, or the words you believe other people might use to bring up a site such as the one you have put together. For instance if you are a lawyer you wouldn’t simply use the word lawyer as there would be millions around the world. You will have to refine it to what kind of lawyer you are, and in what area you practice. It could be something like ‘family law Sydney’ or ‘Michigan family law attorneys.’
Google Analytics or Site Stats are Invaluable in Tracking Your Traffic
Google analytics or site stats are useful tools to have to measure what is working for you and what is not. It will give you various measurements from which you can evaluate what is happening on your site. For instance one area that is tracked is ‘visits’. Knowing and understand this statistic is one of your most valuable insights into what is happening on your site and how your SEO is performing. Visits will give you the following information:
- Page visits. This particular statistic lets you know how many pages on your site received visits during a certain period of time. You will see if it is trending up or down. If it is trending down you will need to find out why.
- Page views. A similar record as that of page visits but it will go further in that it will tell you how many pages were actually viewed by each visitor to your site. It tells you whether your visitor became interested in the visit or disappeared as fast as he or she landed. For instance if 100 people visited your site and 101 page views were recorded it shows you that they are not staying to look around. If however, you had 100 visitors with 10,000 page views you can consider yourself as being quite successful.
- Bounce rates. Bounce rates have to be compared against your visit readings. It gives you a measurement of how many people visited your site and whether they left immediately or hung around for a while. You will need to carefully study the percentage of bounces and put this up against your total traffic. This will tell you if the people making the visit are bothering to read, or look, at what you are trying to impart. If it happened that your traffic actually increased but your bounce rate increased as well you are not achieving any benefit. Once again it indicates people are leaving before learning what you have to say or sell. Similar to a person walking into a shop and immediately turning around and leaving without even bothering to look around. The ideal situation here would be when the traffic visiting your site increased and your bounce rate decreased. This will tell you that you are successfully getting people to come to your site, meaning the keywords are working to get them there and to keep them there, and that they are staying to look around a bit. This should mean you have a better chance of making sales.
Use Your Blog to Whet the Appetite for More
Before you settle back and wait for the money to start rolling in, you should be aware that bounce rates can sometimes be read incorrectly. If you have a good blog structured to point people towards your site for instance, your traffic may well increase because of the interest your blog created. Once on your site visitors may look around a bit but leave having got enough information from your blog.
Be careful that you are not imparting too much information in your blog and that your visitors are given more to interest them once they get to your web pages. If you find the visitors to your site are actually staying for some time it will indicate they are discovering what they want. If this is occurring your next job will be to take them further into your site and preferably not to leave until they have purchased from you.
Your key performance indicators (KPI) are therefore:
- Number of pages indexed
- Page yield
- Known brand
Your blog will help promote your specific brand, and when a visitor has reached your landing page he or she will be reassured if you have used the same background colour and font as you did in your blog. By doing this your visitor will be more inclined to sub-consciously trust you as they will get a sense of familiarity.
This article was written by Will from Life Insurance Finder. Visit Life Insurance Finder to compare life insurance quotes.