Measuring SEO through 4 Different, but Vital Ways – The Handy Dandy Guide towards Quantifying SEO Efforts

When we measure our business efforts at the end of each quarter, why don’t we measure our SEO efforts regularly? Some people deny its importance and are happy with the appearance of their website. But some, who understand the significance of SEO in entirety, and its pivotal role in generating leads for the business by making its more visible in the web cosmos, would certainly emphasize quantifying the SEO efforts, and further ensure that efforts are more streamlined wherever possible, to achieve better results the next time.

Measuring SEO is not difficult, but important. Especially with the paid and free tools available, it becomes simple to measure SEO and determine its direction towards being effective. While there are some aspects you may not have control upon, there are some that could be quantified and measured for their effectiveness in the performance of your website. Here’s a blog that talks about the 4 different techniques of measuring SEO.

Measuring SEO? Wait! Establish What Matters and What Doesn’t, Before Pulling out your Virtual Measuring Tapes!

Obviously, we can’t go on to measuring everything and anything that forms a part of the SEO realm. Here, sensible business owners would go onto measuring the ones posing a direct and royal impact on the website’s performance, and not the ones, beyond anyone’s control. So, ask yourself a few questions – what is significant from the company’s point of view, what is measurable, and lastly, what is controllable. Establishing these answers, would clarify the picture and channel your efforts towards measuring the search engine optimization of your website.

What is your Company’s Purpose of SEOing the Website?

SEO objectives would vary from company to company, and therefore, while measuring SEO for a particular organization, you need to understand the SEO objective of the organization. For some, ranking, along with lead generation would matter the most, while for some, the former would suffice! Therefore, what’s necessary for the company is more important than what you feel should be measured, or what shouldn’t.

What is Measurable?

What could be measured is largely based on the type of company you are catering to. For instance, for a large, well-established and global company, you may have a large database associated with the revenue of the company, its market-share, etc. thus making life simpler and efforts channelized. However, while measuring SEO for a smaller organization, perhaps a start-up, you may have to go by something that is intangible, but valuable, and that is your instinct!

What is Controllable?

At times, perhaps, you would be the one measuring SEO for a website, and not the website developer yourself. In such cases, you may not have complete control over what could be changed and what couldn’t. Hence, do not overthink about things that you cannot control or change, and focus on what you can do and how do you do it!

4 Ways of Measuring SEO

After having established the course, you are now all set to fathom the impact of SEO on a particular website. Here’s more to what you can go out and measure.

Website SEO Ranking :

Perhaps, you would want to rejoice an apparent report ranking your website on the first spot. However, what’s more important in the long-run is the accuracy of these reports, and the flaws while measuring and determining the position. In the highly-dynamic web-world, would a short-term number one ranking position really help? Ask yourself this question.

In such a scenario, where change is the only constant element, it is necessary and better to look at the larger picture in the long-run, rather than the smaller,which is often the more pleasing one! Measure the true ranking of the website, which could be number 1 for the organic listings, but otherwise somewhere amongst the top 10 in local listings and PPC. Try and track the position of keywords, and how does the ranking interact with the changes and the additions that happen around. Determine the page that is ranking well for a keyword. Examine if that works in the context of the other webpages, and try and execute a similar strategy to the remaining ones.

SEO Web Traffic :

Web traffic, being the fundamental objective of SEOing a website, it is imperative that you regularly track the number and trends of visitors landing at your website. Rather than measuring the overall website traffic, it is more beneficial to track the traffic towards different pages of your website such as the principal ones, the sections, the website blog page, newsletters, etc. driven through different search engines.This will help you qualify your SEO efforts and the impact and, at the same time, will help you funnel your efforts towards the lower ranking pages, while you continue to strengthen the already stronger ones.

Visitor’s Interaction with your Website :

This poses a lot of challenges to the one counting SEO. The type of interaction your website visitor would have with your website would vary based on the type of your website. For an informative webpage, the time spent by the visitor on the webpage would matter more, while for an e-commerce portal, the visitor making a purchase would contribute to its SEO effectiveness. In this part, what’s equally important is the number of new visitors resulting out of the SEO activity, although most of them would still intend on not losing the old/ repeated ones.

Materializing Business Through SEO :

The whole purpose of driving visitors to the website through SEO is defeated if the activity doesn’t materialize business, thus proving only to be an expense for the company. SEO is rendered more effective when the growing web-traffic results in the lead generations and builds revenue for the organization. While revenue is quantifiable, measuring leads could be a bit challenging. As a solution to this concern, you can classify the leads based on their nature, for instance, complete, incomplete, spam, etc. and set up points and grades based on their nature, to finally count only the top ones, and not everything and anything that hits the website.
Remember, time is always in our enemy when it comes to business, and therefore count what matters, and avoid that does not, or is beyond your control. Hope, this blog would help you streamline you measure SEO in a better way.