Ask any experienced marketer and they will tell you that your focus should be on the entirety of digital marketing, not just a single tactic like SEO, PPC, reputation management, and so on. That said, digital marketing is such a vast area that encompasses so many tactics, all of which require a separate mention and deep professional analysis. Needless to say, if you want your SEO to skyrocket in 2020 and beyond, you have to take a direct approach to SEO development and success.
Now, there are numerous tactics you should be using to boost your ranking in the SERPs, but in order to succeed at SEO over the long term, you also have to track your most important KPIs in order to act on reliable data and remain flexible in the face of industry shifts and new market trends. SEO is definitely one of the most powerful digital marketing channels at your disposal, and now let’s maximize its potential by giving you the KPIs that will take your SEO strategy forward as a whole.
Organic Search Performance
Organic search is probably the most important KPI that every digital marketer should keep a watchful eye on. Simply put, it denotes the entire purpose of SEO, which is to push you up the SERP ladder and help your brand surpass its competition in the relevant search results. Organic search performance tells you how your site’s individual landing pages are ranking based on the relevance of the content – ideally, you want your visitors to land on the pages that solve their exact problems and answer the question they typed into the search bar.
Of course, the first two or three search results will always be paid ads, but you want your pages to rank right below at the first spot in organic search results. These are the links that people click on the most (skipping the ads in most cases), and you can expect your brand’s reputation to improve the higher you rank and the more visitors you have on your site.
Bounce Rate vs Conversion Rate
People visit and leave your website all day long, but it’s important to know the ratio between those that leave and those who decide to interact with your company. The former is your bounce rate, and the latter is your conversion rate, and you need to monitor both and compare them so that you can derive more meaningful insights about your website, its content, and your SEO strategy in general.
For example, your bounce rate can also tell you where your visitors are dropping out the most, and it can help you fix the problematic areas of your site by writing blog posts that will increase your conversion rate, among other things. On the other hand, analyzing your conversion rate will tell you why, how, and when your visitors decided to make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter, which will further help you strengthen your conversion strategy.
Web page rankings and influential factors
Whether people are searching for specific information, price comparisons, or product pages because they are ready to make a purchase, you have to make sure that your site’s pages are ranking high for every type of user intent – informational, navigational, and transactional. To track and analyze all of this, you first need to keep a watchful eye on your web page rankings and all of the factors that influence their standing in the SERPs.
Doing this effectively requires you to act on relevant data and reports, which is why it’s important to use a well-rounded SEO reporting software that will collect and collate all information on a centralized platform – this way you can have a comprehensive overview of all of your metrics. What you might find, for example, is that you need to create high-quality, keyword driven content, but that you also need to integrate search queries to rank high for voice search as well.
Page loading speed and mobile optimization
The speed and responsiveness of your entire website will not only affect your standing in the SERPs, but it will also determine the rate at which you gain or lose visitors. Needless to say, the modern customer won’t wait around for your site to load.
With that in mind, you need to monitor your site’s speed at all times. Be sure to use accelerated mobile pages to speed up your website and appeal to the mobile demographic, which will also help you convert mobile shoppers with ease.
Backlink performance and influence
Lastly, always keep a watchful eye on your backlink portfolio, and manage your strategy continuously. Be sure to use a comprehensive tool that will let you monitor the status of every backlink you ever made, so that you can see which ones are positively affecting your SEO performance, and which ones might be negatively affecting your standing in the search results. Be sure to fix all broken links, eliminate the ones that might be detrimental to your brand, and always look for new backlink opportunities.
Wrapping up
Digital marketing is a vast area, and SEO is just one of its crucial components. Nevertheless, SEO is imperative for long-term success in the digital world, so be sure to keep a watchful eye on these KPIs in order to make better SEO decisions that will take your business forward.
About the author :
Jolene Rutherford is a marketing specialist – turned blogger. Interested in digital marketing and new technology trends. Love sharing content that can help and inform people.
