Introduction

As soon as you start investing in organic SEO, you will obviously want to start measuring results.

Now, what do we mean by this is? Well, it doesn’t matter if you run a small plumbing business, or you run a large e-commerce shop, that might sell sell thousands of different products, you will want to know how successful your SEO marketing campaigns is, now somebody who doesn’t know much about “organic SEO” might think that the whole process is just about moving the website up the ranks on Google, however it is a lot more than this.

For example, a successful SEO agency should monitor the businesses “bounce rate”, number of “incoming links” and fluctuations in terms of where the business ranks, how long a shopper spends on a page and many more SEO metrics.

This article therefore will guide you through some of the more important seo metrics, that our agency uses to monitor how successful organic our SEO campaigns are:

Here are some of the things we will talk-about in this article:

-Crawlability
-Organic traffic
-Click-through rate (CTR)
-Page speed
-How many visits a particular page has received
-Keyword rankings
-Number of backlinks
-Content quality

 

Your business may have already invested in having a CMS website built, and you may well be very happy with the design of your company website. Yet now your business has moved onto the stage where your starting to ask, well, how do you draw in more customers?

That’s to say you may well be selling coffee beans online or high-value electric cars, it doesn’t really matter what you sell, most businesses require “SEO”. For those that do not know, SEO, simply means seach engine optimisation.

Now, in a nutshell, what our digital marketing agency does, is we help to get company’s onto the first page of Google. Now, you might be thinking, well is organic SEO a fast process?

And the answer to that question is no, it does depend on how strong your direct rivals SEO is, for example, if you have strong competitors, which have heavily invested in SEO for a very long time, then yes its likely to take a business a long time to catch-up.

So, now you know a bit about SEO, and what our marketing agency can offer, well you might be thinking, well, how does your agency monitor SEO results?

How does your agency monitor SEO results?

So this blog post is dedicated to explaining what “Google Analytics“ is, and how it can be used to monitor whether some aspects of your businesses seo is improving, or perhaps not?

For example, our agency which serves businesses in Cardiff, uses Google Analytics to monitor the following for the company’s that we work for:

• Number of organic visitors
• Number of visitors via PPC
• Bounce rate
• Number of backlinks
• If organic visitor numbers are improving?
• How long is a shopper spending on your company website?
• Which pieces of content marketing are working best?
• Are there “Evergreen content marketing” pages that need to be improved?
• Which day’s is your business getting the most shoppers? During these day’s do you want to run offers

Why if you are a small business owner we would highly recommend using Google Analytics

Okay, so let’s assume you are a small business owner, and your business is here in the city of Cardiff, lets say your business in Cardiff Bay, which is in South Wales. Let’s say you are a florist, and you want your business to appear number one in your city here in Cardiff Bay.

So you’ve set-up your Google My Business account, you’ve read a few blog posts on say a respected SEO website like MOZ, and now you want to set-up Google Analytics.

Well, if you have a WordPress website, then this is super easy to do, there’s even free plugins which can help you to set up your Google Analytics code.

Once you have Google Analytics set-up, often you have to wait a while for data, but once your company starts to get Google Analytics data, you can start to see for your florist shop, what your company’s:

• Bounce rate is
• How many organic visitors you are getting, and if the SEO company is managing to get you more organic visitors each month
• How long is a shopper spending on your company website, looking at the flowers that you sell?

 

But, once you’ve got Google Analytics up and running, well, what are the features that your agency often uses?

This blog post will explain some of the more useful features that Google Analytics has, and why so many businesses use it, plus we forgot to mention, its totally free, so why wouldn’t your business use it?

Okay, so what does “Bounce Rate” mean?

Okay, so lets say that your about to launch a new restaurant here in Cardiff, your business sells craft beer and sells wood-fired pizza’s, which sounds, awesome, right? Who doesnt like wood-fired pizza’s.

But you notice that once your website is set live, well, now you have a super high “bounce rate”– yet what does this even mean?

Well, its similar to say someone walking into your restaurant, picking up the menu, then walking straight out the door.

 

And why is having a high bounce rate the same as this?

Well, if Google Analytics is telling you that your business has a super high bounce rate, it’s telling you that Google’s Algorithm has spotted that people are landing on your company website, then they are leaving more or less straightaway.

Which is obviously not good for business, neither is it good for your businesses seo, as digital marketing agencies, like ours believe that if a business has a high bounce rate, and if this is consistently high, well this could damage your businesses seo.

 

And why would a high-bounce rate damage your businesses seo?

Well, it shows low engagement with your website, which means that people do not want to make a booking with your restaurant, instead they may want to book a table at another pizza and craft beer restaurant.

So what’s the solution?

Well you could work with an SEO expert and also your web design company to improve the website.

 

Number of organic visitors or sessions

Now this is a really obvious one, you will want to monitor how many organic visitors your website gets, but not just that, also how are they getting to your website, is it via organic seo? Paid advertising such as PPC (Pay Per Click) or direct?

 

Time on site

Okay, so let’s go back to our example of owning a shop, let’s say that now you own a car dealership, and your selling used cars.

Now, if during say the month of January you had 1000 people coming to your showroom, and the average time each customer spent in the showroom was less than 60 seconds, well, you as the business owner would know there’s a big problem.

That’s to say, why are people who want to buy a used car leaving your showroom so quickly? Are your cars too expensive?

Well, the same logic can be applied to your company’s website, if you are getting thousands of organic visitors, but most are leaving more or less straightaway, well why is that?

 

Is it because the website is difficult to use? Is the main menu difficult to use?

Does your current website make it difficult to sort items, so for example, I am looking for a blue shirt, in size large, can I sort by colour and size?

If you cannot, and the shopper doesn’t want to look through hundreds of shirts, then they may leave your website.

 

Which pages are people visiting the most?

As the business owner, or indeed the marketing manager, you will want to know which pages are the most popular, and as the marketing manager you may wish to apply say an offer on that page, such as free delivery, so that you encourage even more people to purchase from your business.

 

Compare one month with another

How many visitors did your website get in December this year, compared to December last year, did the number go up?

If your business requires white hat seo, then why not call us?