Most business owners understand that the success of a website depends on developing and implementing an SEO strategy. More than one-third (36%) of small businesses already have an SEO strategy. Many owners understand the importance of needing an SEO strategy but they struggle to create one that is effective. To develop and maintain an effective long-term SEO strategy, small business owners need to know the best ways to measure their SEO success. MarketingLand goes over some useful metrics that can help you.
There are three metrics that are useful to understand if your SEO strategy is working:
- Traffic retention
- Backlink quality
- Conversion rate
Traffic retention measures the quality of search audiences by using Google Analytics. This will let you know if your SEO efforts are bringing the right audiences. Two metrics that are helpful in determining the quality of your search traffic are bounce rate and scroll depth. Bounce rate is the measure of searchers who visited one page on your site and didn’t browse further. A high bounce rate could signal that your site needs more work to keep visitors engaged. A high scroll depth would indicate how far visitors scroll down on individual web pages.
Backlink quality determines impact of inbound links; inbound links to your site indicate authority about a topic. Backlink quality is measured by the number of links from websites with high domain authority that should have relevance quality and novelty.
Conversion rate offers insight about the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. To properly measure SEO success you need to have clear goals for your website traffic. The use of conversion rates will let you know how well you are achieving those goals. The quality of the leads you are generating from your SEO is most important. In other words, your conversion rate is the number of website visitors who become paying customers. It can also represent the desired action such as visiting a product description page.
Founder of Local SEO Search, John Vuong says, “business owners are impatient. They’re investing X amount and they’re so used to seeing an immediate return like flyers and newspapers, but SEO is a long-term game.”
These are some tips that with patience can result in great success. Want a professional to help you get started? We’re here to help you with your search engine optimization to generate leads! Reach out to us with any questions by calling (248) 477-5994 or contact us online today.