Expert Tips for How to Measure Your SEO Success.mp3
Speaker 1 I have a. OK, hey, everyone, I am Will Gordon, an Internet marketing specialist here at Weatherwax, and say we’re going to be finishing the final of our live guys and we are going to be discussing how to measure the success of CEO. When we talk about measuring success, if we really have to start with a baseline of our goals, we have to have realistic goals. First of all, if we’re, you know, say we get 10 visits to our website a month and you come to us and say, we want to have one hundred thousand visits to our our website by the end of next month, that’s not really a realistic goal, depending on what our marketing initiatives are. So the first step in creating success and measuring that success is making sure that we have realistic goals to go along with our marketing initiatives. Once we have those goals set, then it really comes down to what tools we’re typically using to measure whether we hit those goals. Here’s where we started with our goals. Here’s where we want to end up. Somewhere along that spectrum, hopefully beyond is how we say that we hit our goals and beginning and that’s how we measure. So some of the tools that we like to use here, a free one that’s online that I suggest everybody use is Google Analytics. Something in the house that we use is our marketing cloud effects that’s available to all of our clients as well.
That really helps us establish and saying, OK, here’s all of our leads, all of our traffic. And it’s clearly laid out as far as are we hitting those metrics? Are we below are we above those metrics? And if there’s something we need to do to make sure that we are reaching those metrics, we can dig into the data and those measurements to make sure that we’re exceeding those expectations. So specifically, it’s much more of a long term game than is a short term game. So another thing we have to bring into frame when we’re talking about measuring that success is a timeframe of results. So when we started this campaign, we don’t expect to see amazing results or results at all within the first month of the campaign. So really, when we’re looking at the grand scheme of things, we might look at things a year over year basis rather than a month over month basis, at least to begin with as we start building some momentum. So sometimes we might have disappointed feelings if we don’t see results right away with the campaign. But it’s not really fair to measure Nassios campaign’s effectiveness a month into that campaign, over six months, a year or two years into that campaign, then we can start looking at those month to month basis or quarter to quarter basis, as well as still looking at things year over year in time just because it does take time to index into Google’s index. So that way we could actually see the results of what we’re trying to do online and measure those results as well. To so within Google, you can use you can set your date frame to pretty much whatever you want to be looking at.
So if you wanted to look at July year, every year, you can do that comparative data just simply sitting in July 1st, July 30 for twenty seventeen, comparing it to what it is, twenty sixteen compared to twenty fifteen. Whatever you want, you have that ability to segment that data out to measure the results of the efforts that you put on your website. Another great way to measure your own results is actually to measure them up to what we can get of our competitors data. So it analytics. We obviously can’t get the data from our competitors websites, but there are some tools out there that we can get some insights of how our competitors are doing in the organic atmosphere. Two of my favorites to use our SDM Rush and Spy, who gives us insights on how their ranking for certain keywords or how much organic traffic that they’re getting to their website. So forseen looking at our organic data trend line for traffic or for keywords over time and saying, you know, this doesn’t look like to where we want to be or should be. Maybe we need to bring it in and say, OK, well, look what our competitors did over the same time frame. And maybe we can see that we had far more growth than we did than our competitors or maybe vice versa. And we need to do some more pivoting and some shifting to our strategy.
But just looking at our growth alone and measuring our success alone, we should really bring in those of our competitors to at least the insight that we can get from the tools available. What we can do is to compare their data, compare their growth with our growth, and that kind of puts things into perspective. As far as the competitive, competitive measurement of CEO goes. When we’re in Google Analytics, some of the things that we want to make part of our goals growth is the number one thing. What are we measuring growth of is that the amount of keywords that our site is ranking for specific keywords or just a general number of long tail and short tail keywords, is it the amount of traffic that we’re getting? Is it the amount of leads that we’re getting, even withinside leads? We can go into macro conversions and micro conversions and what what those are on your website, what is it that you are looking to increase for your business or for your website? Analytics kind of combines everything into one, and you can make anything your goal within analytics traffic alone, you’re able to segment down whether you’re doing a page search or get. Search or even from certain referral traffic sites that you’re getting traffic from, but you can go in and see how your traffic has grown incrementally month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year in analytics. So it’s an easy way to measure the traffic that’s coming to your website along with traffic. You want to see the leads that come out from that traffic as well, too.
Before I get to Leeds, something that kind of goes inside or along with an increase in traffic and leads is user engagement metrics on the site, too. As Google is getting into more of an A.I. intelligence with their search results, the user engagement metrics on your site are becoming more important to. So when you’re paying attention to things like bounce rate or time on site or average session duration, those types of things, or even pages, procession, those types of things are playing into how Google is ranking certain Web pages and websites nowadays and we’ll probably continue into the future. So keeping an eye on those trends and measuring the change in performance over those trends over time could also be part of your success metrics. Or if they’re in the red or going negative, it’s something to look at to see what can we do to turn this around and make it a positive for us. And then when we talk about leads, we’re seeing increases in traffic, increases in engagement metrics. Hopefully on the other side, you’re going to see increases in leads to what are the leads on your website. Google Analytics makes it extremely easy to measure just about any type of goal on your website, whether it be a contact form fill out. If we’re using a call track or a call tracking number to track calls to your business or your certain certain marketing channels, we do that with call track graphics.
Here you can track any time a video has been played on your site, whatever your micro or macro conversions are, even for e-commerce, if it’s sales on your websites, Google Analytics makes it extremely easy to integrate that into just about any website so you can track very easily your goals on the website and what channels are coming from. Like I said, if you’re doing organic, if you’re doing referral, paid social, any type of traffic, come to your site. You can really segment that out and measure by channel itself. So going into Google Analytics, I’d suggest that everybody be using this tool. It’s free to use their user friendly, but you can measure just about anything that you need to to measure the success of your business. You just want to make sure that you were nailing down from the very beginning. I can’t harp on that enough of what your actual goals are and what’s the most important thing to your business. So if it’s if it’s ranking for certain keywords, that’s not necessarily going to be within analytics itself. And personally, I don’t think it’s the most important thing for businesses out there. What I would recommend that you’d be looking at is your traffic and then the goals that you define up front as far as whether it be forums for your website, calls to your website, free trial downloads, things along those lines that are really impacting the bottom line of your business. So you have a keyword that you’re relying on to be ranking number one top of the page, but you can’t even crack page one for that keyword. What you can do is you can go into Google Analytics segment down to the page that you think you should be ranking for the keyword on and seen what’s the bounce rate on that page. And then once you find out what the bounce rate is, can you go to your page and say, OK, why might someone be jumping on? And then Pogo sticking right off my page? You can make adjustments right there that might help you out, bump you up towards the top of page one. What’s the pages procession? Is it only one again, going along with the bounce rate and people are jumping right off. Maybe we need something else on that page that takes that person directly to another page, whether it be a nice button that takes into a contact form, whether it’s images breaking up the text with it, a little link to another page internally on the site, something to keep that person on the site rather than bouncing back off. Like I said, those user engagement metrics will really help your pages rank better as Google leans more towards US A.I. in the future. So when we talk about measuring success for us, we have to have that baseline of reports of where is our traffic before we start? Where is our rankings? Before we start, where’s our leads? Before we start, we use that data to make projections based upon our marketing initiatives to see where we should be in six months, a year, five years down the road, based upon, again, based upon where we are currently and what our marketing objectives are and how the whole entire scheme of the Internet is changing. So we have that baseline data six months out. We have that to compare to. So if we’re building so many links to a website, if we’re adding so much content per quarter to our website, if we’re changing the titles, the meta and working on technical SEO as well and go in with a full content strategy, here’s what we should see. Here’s where we are. Sometimes we’ll be above, sometimes we’ll be low, sometimes we’ll be right on track. But we have to have that baseline to compare it to. Like I mentioned, in analytics, we can compare, compare quarter over quarter. We can compare month over month, year over year. So where are we now? Where do we want to be? And that marketing initiative that we have is that plan to get us where? Want to be again, we need to be realistic, we need to compare where we are at the current moment where competitors are, what their growth has looked like over the past in our competitive sphere. And like I said, if we’re on that path but kind of missing it, we need to look into the data and analytics to see where we need to adjust. So we’re kind of flat lining now. What can we adjust to get back up on that upward tick once again? Gordon, thanks again for joining us for our final live guide series of how to measure the success of you want to be ranking number one, but you can’t even crack the top. So you have a key word.