Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Like many entrepreneurs, you might be wondering if your SEO efforts are effective and how you can measure their success.
In this article, SEO experts from the Montreal SEO agency My Little Big Web present you with the various metrics to analyze in order to measure the effectiveness of your natural SEO.
Conversions
The easiest and most effective way to measure the success of your SEO strategy is to determine how many conversions have been generated as a result of your SEO efforts. Simply put, a conversion is a goal achieved on your website.
A goal is achieved when an Internet user:
- reaches a specific page of your website.
- For example, they visited your “contact” page.
- stays on a page for a minimum duration.
- For example, they spent 10 seconds reading one of your blog articles.
- visits a specific number of pages.
- For example, they visited 3 different pages before going to the “contact” page.
- has performed a specific action on your website.
- For example, they subscribed to your newsletter.
Imagine that you are a dentist and your goal is to get as many leads as possible, in which case a conversion will be a phone call or sending a contact form, both made through your SEO.
Before you can analyze these conversions, you will need to configure goals in Google Analytics. Simply go to the “Admin” section at the bottom left of the Google Analytics menu, click on the “objectives” tab and create new ones.
If your goals have already been created, you can analyze the data and observe how your visitors behave on your website each month, or at least each quarter, if you operate on a more seasonal basis, with Google Analytics reports.
Traffic
Your SEO efforts have to drive as much qualified traffic as possible from search engines, i.e. as many Internet users as possible to your website. Naturally, the more traffic you have on your site, the more likely you are to generate conversions. The Google Analytics tool allows you to measure this traffic.
You can access this data by going to the “Acquisition” section and “All Traffic” and filtering your search by clicking on “Organic Search” to only analyze the traffic from your SEO efforts.
This tool gives you access to various information including:
- Some of the keywords that people used to find your website. Since 2013, Google Analytics has only disclosed a small part of the keywords used by Internet users and the majority of these keywords will be classified as “not provided”. However, you can access more information, albeit limited, in the Google Search Console, another free tool in the Google suite.
- The search engines used,
- The most visited web pages on your site, etc.
Positioning
Analyzing your website’s positioning is crucial for measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Once again, this is a true virtuous circle: the better positioned you are on search engines, the more your traffic and conversions will increase.
In order to determine the positioning of your keywords, you can use the SEMRush tool. You can analyze the positioning of your keywords and those of your competitors. You will then have an idea of which keywords your efforts should be focused on to increase your online visibility.
Share of visibility in Google Search Console
Google Search Console lets you analyze your share of visibility on search engines.
This tool gives you access to a wide range of information including:
- Number of clicks,
- Click-through rate,
- Number of impressions, i.e. the number of times a visitor sees your page without clicking on it,
- The most visited pages of your website, etc.
Your ranking will influence the number of impressions your website has on search engines and the number of clicks.
Consider the example of the dentist in Montreal. If his website appears in 10th place on Google, his number of impressions will be high, but his number of clicks will probably be low since users will undoubtedly click on a higher ranked website.
Performance between different traffic acquisition channels
Another trick for measuring the success of your SEO strategy is to analyze the performance between different traffic acquisition channels, i.e. the path through which the user has accessed your website. You can also use the Google Analytics tool for this.
This analysis is important because it tells you which channels bring you the most conversions.
For example, if you advertise online with Google Ads and you find that it brings you more traffic than SEO, you will know that you will have to continue to run paid ads and therefore invest more time and money. On the other hand, if your SEO efforts bring you more traffic than online advertising, then you should continue to work on your SEO.
Local SEO performance
Another free tool that lets you measure your SEO success is the Google My Business dashboard.
This tool will inform you about your local visibility with a wealth of data including:
- the number of calls you have received,
- the number of directions requested to get to your company,
- the keywords you are positioned on at the local level, i.e. the keywords that the user will type directly on Google Maps.
In addition, keep in mind that your local SEO also influences your SEO on search engines.
Now you can measure the success of your SEO strategy
In this article, our web agency’s SEO experts have attempted to show you the easiest ways to measure the success of your SEO strategies. We also encourage you to regularly monitor this data, since it can change faster than you might think!
If you still have any questions or need help setting up an effective SEO strategy, you are welcome to contact us and we will be happy to help.
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