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Are you crushing your SEO efforts?
Wait… do you even know?
Your time is a precious commodity and the last thing you want to do is put in a ton of work and not see the returns on your efforts.
The best way for you to analyze your progress is by measuring it with an SEO test!
This is the most reliable way to determine if what you’re doing is actually working towards propelling your website’s success. Killing it? Awesome!
If you’re on track, you need to know so you can keep making those same efforts. If you aren’t doing as well as you’d like, you can reconsider your approach and do something different.
So where do you start and what can you do to test your SEO?
Here are 5 metrics that will help you determine if your SEO is working or if it needs some adjusting.
Your SEO performance should be a part of a great website design. It is the result of how successful or not your search engine optimization practices are.
It can be difficult to conclude how well your website is doing just by face value.
The best strategy you can employ is tracking your effort through SEO metrics.
There are over 200 Google ranking factors that you can utilize to boost your ranking and increase your website traffic.
It can be difficult to execute every single ranking factor, but if you’re doing things to improve your SEO to get more customers, you want to know how’s it working.
The better your SEO performance, the better your web pages are doing and the easier it’ll be to achieve your business goals.
Simple enough.
So how do you know if your SEO efforts are effective in aligning with your business goals?
You really don’t unless you measure it.
You can get a sense of what’s working and what’s not by monitoring your web analytics, and there are plenty of tools out there you can utilize.
Even better, there are a number of reliable tools that you can use to measure your SEO metrics for FREE.
Let’s take a deeper look into how you can measure your SEO performance.
The ultimate goal of SEO is to get you traffic.
This is definitely a metric you want to be able to measure.
Google Analytics is a great tool that helps you track your search traffic.
How many visitors does your website have per week? Per month, quarter, year?
This is the first metric you want to identify and Google Analytics will tell you if your traffic is increasing or decreasing.
Are your SEO efforts are working?
If you discover your traffic is going up, excellent!
If not, then you know you have to change your approach.
I have a great post about how to boost your website traffic that’s incredibly effective. If you want to know more be sure to click on the link and check it out!
Similar to Google Analytics, Google Search Console is a free tool created by Google that you can use to measure your SEO performance.
This tool provides you with a ton of helpful information that you can use to determine whether your SEO campaigns are on track or not.
You start by setting up a free account and Google will take you through a step by step process to get you started.
Once you’re in, it will show you the impressions your website is getting, click thru rates, clicks, and your web pages’ position.
Impressions are how many times browsers see your web page. If you have way more impressions than clicks, don’t panic. This is an indicator that you are probably on the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th page of the search results. You can look at this as potential. You may not be ranking yet, but as you continue to publish content you have the potential to move up in the Google ranks.
Of course, your money making potential is in your click-thru rates because it’s clicks that drive traffic to your website.
But you can analyze these factors and once you observe those numbers going up you can be assured that you’re doing something right with your SEO!
Are people linking to your website?
Backlinks aren’t the ultimate indicator that your SEO model is working, however, is it one way to determine your SEO performance.
You can use Ahrefs.com to track how many backlinks your website is getting.
That’s not all…It also shows you how many backlinks your competitors are getting!
Being able to see how your site compares with others and whether or not your backlinks are increasing will put you in a position to up your game.
One important note about backlinks: DO NOT EVER BUY LINKS.
Link buying is a nasty black hat SEO technique, a shady SEO tactic that will put your website at risk for being banned by Google.
Are your web pages indexed?
If they are not, you will be stifled from showing up on the search results pages no matter how awesome your content is!
Why is this even a thing?
Well, without being indexed, Google doesn’t necessarily know your website or your web pages exist.
When Google search engine spiders or bots crawl your website, their algorithm will determine which keyword each piece of content ranks for and if it can indeed rank.
Indexing can happen organically over time, or, you can be proactive and get your pages indexed now.
This is done through Google Search Console by submitting a sitemap that allows Google’s search engine spiders to crawl your web pages.
If you’re on WordPress, you can simply go to the Yoast SEO plugin which will automatically create a sitemap for you that’s regularly updated.
How often you post will affect your SEO effectiveness.
How much content are you producing weekly? Once a week, every day?
Inconsistent, minimal posting is an ineffective way to gain any traction from your SEO efforts.
A post or two a week will make the process of getting to the top of Google’s ranking a slow uphill battle.
Ideally, you should be producing a minimum of 3 articles a week.
Posting 3 or more blogs a week has helped me retain a high ranking on Google, and the more content you produce, the more keywords there are for Google to index you for.
And the more keywords indexed, the higher your chances are to rank and bring in more traffic to your website!
Doing keyword research, creating and posting quality content is just one piece of the puzzle.
You have to make sure your SEO model is actually working if you want to get returns on your investment.
By conducting an SEO test and determining how well or how poorly your website’s performance is, you can make the most out of your time and energy.
Doing more of the things that actually produce results, and putting an end to those techniques you used to do but aren’t generating anything for you.
These SEO metrics will help you to become aware of where you are. Then, you can create an action plan that will allow you to get increased traffic to your website and accomplish your goals.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comment section below, I’d be happy to help.
-Josh