3 Key Metrics Small Businesses Should Monitor for SEO Campaign Success
With new websites and forms of content being released daily, small businesses have to stay on top of their game to make sure that they’re taking the proper actions to direct traffic to their sites. And this doesn’t just mean setting it up for success- true SEO campaign success comes from constant monitoring and modification to suit changing trends. We recommend checking traffic retention, backlink quality, and conversion rate. Let’s take a closer look.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the technique used by digital strategists to help direct organic traffic to a source of content. When a user conducts a search, they utilize certain keywords or phrases to do so. From there, the search engine will scan through millions of potential sources containing those keywords to deliver the best results. So, having those keywords featured in your content helps your site land higher in the search ranks and hopefully on the first result page (we all know hardly anyone ventures past the first page). This, among other things, determines whether your content is reaching the right eyes or not.
Traffic retention
The goal of SEO is not just to bring in traffic, but to make sure that traffic is of good quality. In other words, bringing in 100 people who actually engage with your website or purchase your product is better than 1,000 people where only a handful do. To measure traffic retention, you can use bounce rate and scroll depth. Bounce rate measures how many visitors only visited one page of your website before leaving. If you have a high bounce rate, you might want to consider including more engaging, interactive content to keep your web visitors scrolling through your site. However, high bounce rate can also indicate that users found what they needed right away and didn’t need to look through other pages. Because of this, it’s good to also measure the scroll depth to see whether users are engaged with the entire page or not.
Backlinks
Apart from keywords, Google also ranks your page based on whether it seems reputable or not. How do you make your site seem reliable? Backlinks. Inbound links, or backlinks, are links to your site that are found in other websites of a similar topic. Think of them like mini certifications. So, the more inbound links, the better. However, it’s important that the sites that are linking your page are reputable themselves. When it comes to measuring the quality of backlinks, look into relevance and novelty. Is the site you’re linking to relevant to your content? Are you constantly getting linked to the same site? Getting endorsed by newer domains can have a stronger impact than a site that links to you frequently.
Conversion rate
As mentioned above, the goal is not to just bring any visitor to your site, but to direct people who are actually interested in your product or service. Conversion rate helps you directly track which of your website visitors actually convert to paying customers. You can use this measurement to see how effective your SEO strategy is and how compelling your website content is.
Having trouble creating the right SEO strategy or tracking analytics? Our team of experts here at Kraus Marketing are ready to help you with all of your digital marketing needs from web development and design to copy-writing and SEO strategy. Contact us today for more information!