Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical component of any professional services firm’s digital marketing strategy. By improving the quality and quantity of traffic coming to your website through organic search results pages, you can increase your visibility and attract new customers. As a professional service provider, it is essential to have a thorough understanding of SEO and how it can help your business achieve its overall goals.
Use the tools available to track your website’s performanceincluding metrics such as referrals, links and rankings, can help you make informed decisions about your SEO efforts and measure the success of your SEO campaigns.
When you want to measure your SEO effectiveness, you should consider these universal metrics:
1. Classification of keywords
A variety of tools, com snakes and Google Search Console (easy and free to use), allow you to do keyword research and track your site’s ranking over time. There are other tools like Ahrefs and Semrush that are paid. Why Track Keyword Ranking?
You can track your SEO effectiveness; a better rank factor for a keyword tends to mean a better overall ranking, especially for long-tail keywords.
Note: When your domain rankings or organic traffic metrics improve, but your target keyword rankings do not, you may have a problem with your keyword research and target keyword selection. Target long-tail keywords and/or less competitive target keywords.
2. References from search engines
Google and the Yahoo!-Bing partnership have accounted for more than 97% of US search traffic for years. When you compare traffic from each search engine, you can:
Compare each search engine’s volume contributions to its market share.
Quickly identify and fix significant declines in search engine results pages (SERPS) traffic.
Discover strategic value by identifying tactics that work successfully for one (or more) search engines and applying those tactics to other engines.
3. Organic Traffic
As a professional service provider, it is essential to have a solid understanding of the value and importance of organic traffic to your site through search engine results pages (SERPs). Employing effective SEO efforts can provide a significant return on investment since it costs nothing. However, it is important to note that rankings alone do not necessarily translate into SEO success, and the true metric of SEO performance is the amount of organic traffic directed to your site.
By collecting and evaluating data over multiple periods, such as weekly, monthly, and annually, you can track the short- and long-term results of your SEO efforts and then make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategies.
Weekly data: This data shows short-term changes in traffic.
Monthly data: This data identifies long-term results and success of SEO campaigns.
Annual data: This data provides an apples-to-apples comparison that allows you to see trends over time i from year to year, which is important if your services vary from season to season.
This approach also allows you to see trends over time and compare performance from year to year, which is especially useful if your services have seasonal variations.
4. Percentage of organic bounces
Bounce rate, which Google Analytics defines as “the percentage of single page sessions” is a great way to measure user experience and engagement on your site. Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who leave the site after viewing just one page. This metric is an important indicator of the engagement and effectiveness of a website’s content and user experience.
If you have a high bounce rate, many people may leave your site’s landing page without clicking or interacting with the page. This affects your click-through rate (CTR).
A high bounce rate can indicate that a website’s content is not relevant or attractive to visitors, or that the website’s design and navigation is confusing or difficult to use.
To improve your website’s bounce rate, it’s important to focus on it providing relevant and high quality content, as well as optimizing website design and user experience. This can include things like optimizing page load times, simplifying navigation, and including calls to action that encourage visitors to explore the website further.
note: A landing page with a high bounce rate is always cause for concern and should be further analyzed.
5. Pages per session
For this engagement metric, higher numbers are better, because visitors go to multiple pages on your site. A low number of pages per session may indicate that your page navigation needs work, or that your content doesn’t provide enough of a hook to keep people on your site.
6. Organic conversion rate
Organic traffic is great, but once people find your site, you haven’t converted a website visitor into a lead…yet. That’s why it’s good to track this aggregated conversion rate as it’s relevant to the services you provide.
7. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
A better CTR tends to improve keyword rankings. When Google sees more people clicking on your website, over time it will rank it higher.
How does CTR work? If you have 100 impressions and 10 clicks, you will have a CTR of 10%.
8. Pages indexed and crawled per day
When Google discovers a site, its robots crawl it frequently. The more often Google crawls your site, the better: when you make changes or publish new blog posts, it gets noticed pretty quickly and is often indexed within minutes.
Want Google to like your site? Getting good user metrics for bounce rate, time on page, etc. start with good page speed.
A good page speed is necessary for a crawlable website. This article explains the importance of maintaining a fast website with a good user experience that helps keep potential customers on your website. The Google PageSpeed Insights Tool is a good place to test your website speed and good recommendations on how to make improvements.
Knowing and tracking your site’s index status also helps you know how many of your site’s pages are indexed and what errors cause pages to be de-indexed.
9. Tracking Errors
Broken links, 404 errors, and missing pages make it very difficult for Google to crawl your site. If it can’t find your pages, it can’t rank them. You don’t need to check daily or weekly, but make a note to check the status of the index monthly and fix any crawl errors you find. Google Search Console makes it easy to track errors site-wide (by default) or by segment (with a filter).
A recently published article detailed the most important SEO Success Metrics to Track for 2023. In addition to the items listed above, you may also want to keep track of:
Mobile usability
Lifetime value for users
Quality inbound link count
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