SEO Blog

In SEO it is important that you are able to monitor the progress of your site. Whatever your metric of success is, without some measure of growth it is difficult to determine the effectiveness of your SEO efforts to date.

So what should you measure and how should you gain those statistics? Well, one obvious way of charting how your SEO work has affected the website is through the number of visitors it achieves. Okay, this isn’t a foolproof method and there are variables that can affect traffic flow that will have very little to do with your optimisation, including seasonal trends. But ultimately you want to become more visible online and the best way of indicating whether that is working is through traffic.

But whilst you do want traffic, it should be targeted. If your bounce rate (the number of people who leave the site after viewing just one page) increases at the same, or higher, rate as your traffic, something is clearly wrong. When your bounce rate does increase, you might need to look at the pages that are causing people to exit so rapidly and perhaps the keywords you’re targeting.

Another very good metric for measuring development can be found in the rankings themselves. These may fluctuate on a day-to-day level depending on algorithm changes and newly indexed content, so it is often better to measure over longer periods. If you can get a fortnightly or even a monthly report produced, this will help you to get a better reading of how your site is performing.

If there are alarming slumps across the board, you might be better able to identify a site-wide issue. Where there are gains, you can see what techniques have worked and perhaps implement these solutions elsewhere.

A lot of SEO is about trial and error. So you have to be prepared to not only research and implement changes, but then also monitor their effectiveness. In part, the statistics that you get back from these tests will help to fuel your future optimisation efforts; so they really are a vital component in the overall makeup of your sites development.

Obtaining these statistics is as simple as installing an analytics package on your site. Whether you choose the free Google Analytics tool or one of the numerous alternatives out there, you should be able to get the in-depth information you need to effectively perform and monitor SEO. Without this, you could well be flying blind – whether for better or worse.