How to Measure SEO Success
You may have heard a lot about SEO. It stands for search engine optimization and is important to the algorithms that can put your website on top or leave you at the bottom. Here are some ways to measure if your efforts are getting noticed.
You first need a basic understanding of SEO. When people search the internet, they use keywords or phrases to find what they are looking for amongst the hundreds of thousands of web pages that have been created. If you’ve ever looked in the upper left-hand corner of your search engine results, often certain words return millions of results.
No one bothers to go through all of those. They rarely look beyond the first or second page. So that is where you want your web pages, content, videos and other marketing tools that help your business to appear, in order to be found by those who are looking.
You have to do some work first. SEO is not an exact science. But, you can use keyword programs (for free) to help you find out which have the highest amount of competition and which are underused. From there, the trial and error begins. Some recommend using one keyword per web page to see which ones are drawing the most traffic for you. Also be sure that your website is registered with the major search engines.
Some Ways to Measure SEO
* Backlinks — These are the external links that link back to your website from other places. You can create backlinks by using the resource box when submitting content to article directories, bio boxes when guest blogging, as well as signature lines on forums and places like that.
* Traffic metrics — How many unique visitors do you have compared to returning visitors? What you want are unique visitors because these are new faces that are being drawn in by your marketing strategies. You can also look at revenue generated against visitors at any given time.
* Google Analytics — This free program gives the business owner lots of numbers and useful information to calculate if their keywords are generating the traffic that they want. Test your keywords for at least three months to get an accurate picture of their success.
What you ultimately want is for people to buy from you. You want that conversion from casual visitor to customer. It is essential that you include a call to action on your website pages that will compel the reader to make that conversion. You can track this metric as well.
When customers find you on the internet, is it a matter of calculated marketing or luck? You’d prefer the former and these are some tools to help you determine is this is so.
This article originally appeared here: http://patch.com/california/burlingame-hillsborough/how-to-measure-seo-success
