Measuring SEO Effectiveness

Business and Life is all about constant improvements, likewise SEO – as its’ an on-going process, it needs constant improvements. But improvements can only be made when something is measured / tracked.

There are various components that affect SEO performance and measuring those components is what makes it better. There are various tools available for measuring SEO performance but one of the factors that I use is Google Analytics Tool.

Google Analytics (GA) is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It covers various aspects like:

• Location from where the website was accessed
• Total Organic Clicks
• Time Spent by users on a particular page
• Bounce Rate
• Pages browsed by visitors
• & much more….

Today we will discuss about the factors that are most important when measuring SEO performance and keeping Google Analytics tool in picture.

Installing Google Analytics:

Setting up Google Analytics for your website is simple and straightforward:

1.  Create or sign in to your Analytics account:
    •   Go to google.com/analytics
    •   Do one of the following:
    •   To create an account, click Start for free.
    •   To sign in to your account, Click Sign in to Analytics.
2.   Setup a property in your Analytics account. A property represents your website or app, and is the collection point in Analytics for the data from your site or app.
3.   Setup a reporting view in your property. Views let you create filtered perspectives of your data; for example, all data except from your company’s internal IP addresses, or all data associated with a specific sales region.
4.   Follow the instructions to add the tracking code to your website so you can collect data in your Analytics property.

That’s’ it! You’re all set to use the tool for your website and generate reports on the SEO performance.

Factors to be considered when measuring:

As you’ve already installed Google Analytics code on your website, its time to know about how you can access the Reports and study the report accordingly.

Access your analytics here: google.com/analytics and Sign In to access the reports. You will be navigated to the screen with the data.

On the left menu under “Reports” Tab, there are 5 sub topics which give info regarding your website visitors & they are:

1.      Realtime

2.      Audience

3.      Acquisition

4.      Behavior

5.      Conversions

We will go through some of the important ones which will give you an idea of your overall website performance:

Some of the most important SEO Metrics:
There are many different factors which are recorded within your Google Analytics report but below are mainly some important ones that you can take into consideration and analyse your SEO for your website.

Organic Search Traffic
One of the important metrics to track & know how many visitors are coming to your website. So, track your organic traffic monthly and overall it should increase over a period of time. If it isn’t, then you need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy.

Bounce Rate
If your visitors are dropping off your website, that’s what is counted as the Bounce Rate. A high bounce rate is basically that your website visitors are not finding what they are really looking out for so they are ultimately leaving the site.

Time Spent / Page
This is basically the amount of time your users are spending on your website pages. This metric is really beneficial to know which pages are being visited by your website visitors and the time spent on each page. This helps you understand what your visitors are actually looking for.

Pageviews
This is a total number of views per page. It’s just a total number of views per page of your website is being visited. This helps you understand which pages are visited multiple times so you can know which pages have the maximum page views – that is which is the best section your visitors keep visiting. 

Returning vs New Visitors
This metric helps you understand who are your new & your returning visitors. So, if more of your visitors are returning, your website is that engaging. Keep a tap on this metric as if you have a good number of visitors but they are not returning, you are losing out a big amount of revenue.

Crawl Errors
Crawlers are basically automated programs on which search engines rely while they index your website. So, your website while it is being crawled should not have any errors as this might affect your ranking.

Traffic by Device Types
With increasing use of mobile devices, users are more and more using the web through mobile devices and lesser then conventional desktops. So, it is important to know how many visitors are visiting your website through mobile device which will instead help you understand how you can optimize your website to be mobile friendly / load faster on mobile devices & much more …

So, guys these factors are really important and if you can start tracking these initially and accordingly make further adjustments on your SEO front.

Stay tuned for my next article and keep reading J