How successful are SEO projects?
Imagine having spent a lot of time building a beautiful website and trying to improve its content marketing, you have spent a lot of time looking at the personality of your buyers and audience. Now it’s time to show the results of the efforts and the latest advancements in the campaigns launched to the employer and upstream. Here are a few serious questions:
- How can real-world achievements be gained?
- What criteria are there to show the values obtained by the project to the employer or manager?
The answers to these questions lie in the “Key Performance Indicators,” or KPIs.
Key performance indicators are objective and tangible metrics that transparently represent the percentage of your success in your campaigns and activities on a website.
But do you know the most important KPIs that can demonstrate your success in SEO and digital marketing?
In this article, we introduce eight of these critical indicators to determine the success rate of an SEO project.
1. Increase Website Visits from Google or Organic Sessions
This index will monitor your website’s visibility through search engines such as Google and Bing. Each session means a user logs on to your website pages, doing something like scrolling, commenting, or tagging content and ultimately leaving the website at the end. But if a user does not have any activity on the page of your website, the session will automatically close after 30 minutes.
Each user can create multiple sessions when they visit your website. Natural hits, or organic ones, can be traced directly through the Google Analytics tool. But there are side tools like Agency Analytics that collect reports from various sources on this topic.
Your website’s natural traffic is the most important key to its performance. Because it is directly in line with the main goal of SEO activities, which is to be seen in search engines.
As soon as your on-page and off-page activities begin, your website will improve, and the position of your website on the keywords you target will go up in search engines.
The clickthrough rate you expect from your website is determined by changing the position of each of your pages in the search engine results page. For example, changing the position of your pages from third to second on the search results page will have a significant positive impact on your website’s click rate. Obviously, changing your position on pages, for example, improving the position from the second page of the results to the first page will also grow in the same proportion at your click rate.
The best way to increase natural or organic search is by choosing a competitive, challenging, and relevant business and writing a strong, descriptive description that, with a little charisma, will become a good call for your website.
Note that both digital and traditional methods, as well as online and offline marketing techniques, can help increase your website visits and organic sessions.
2. Ranking in imporant keywords
The keyword rank criterion is based on the position of your website in specific keywords on powerful search engines such as Google and Bing. The more you approach the first place, the better it will be for you.
To check the rank of the website on the important keywords, there are tools like SEMrush, SE Ranking and, most importantly, Google Search Console, which can help you.
As a rule, your position in some key terms, such as a brand name or longer key phrases that represent your activity, will usually be good. On the other hand, other keywords and phrases that have high competition for business purposes should be considered as long-term strategies for you.
The ranking of your website’s keywords is also an important KPI. Because there is a close relationship between your customers’ direct communication with your SEO activities. Improving your rank in keywords is your first step towards achieving other goals such as increasing traffic, new users, and ultimately more sales.
Note that website ranking fluctuations in the short run are natural and dependent on updates from the Google algorithm, but you should see growth in the long run.
Do not observe your website’s position daily! Do it at most weekly but regularly. A drop in your ranking can be a sign of a problem on your website that needs to be addressed.
3. Increased sales and conversion rate to customer lead
The two initial factors that were mentioned were about attracting users to the website through search engines. But what do users need to do after entering your website?
Surely you like and hope that the user attracted to the website will eventually buy something.
An absorbed user, or lead, is, in fact, a potential customer who probably performs one of the following activities:
- Sign up for newsletter
- Fill in the contact form for more information
- Make a phone call
- Sign up for your webinar
- Or, most of all, buying products online
- By defining the goal and event in Google Analytics, you can monitor the attracted users from a number of perspectives:
- Mobile conversion rate or desktop?
- What is the gender of your audiences that have become your customers?
- Has your content been trusted or satisfied?
- The adsorbed users moved easily to the predicted customer’s path?
A review of these criteria will help you make sure you have a good visibility of your website’s success. If your goal is simply to increase the number of visits or to get a better position, you may not be aware of the main purpose of increasing sales. In many SEO projects, although there is no significant increase in website visit statistics, there is an impressive impact on user-to-customer conversion and sales growth.
4. Exit rate or bounce rate
The bounce rate is a measure that measures the percentage of users leaving immediately after they open your website without any activity. This criterion is measured based on the number of unused sessions relative to the total sessions.
The standard jump rate is about 40 to 60 percent. This means that nearly half of the sessions created by users without any activity by them is over.
Keep in mind that the percentage of jump rates is directly related to your industry and type of audience.
This criterion is important because for search engine algorithms, users’ satisfaction in viewing results is a high priority. When a user searches for a phrase, search engines try to show users the most relevant results with the best possible quality to solve the problem.
When a user jumps to a Google results page immediately after entering one of the results, it can indicate that the result shown is not related, easily understood, or that the content is not trusted for the user. On the other hand, the low jump rate of users can indicate the relevance of the content to the user’s requirements, user-friendly routing on the page and satisfactory results for them.
Be careful that 40 to 60 percent is only a moderate number, and you can get that number of your website as low as possible. Usually, the jump rate alone is not a good factor in measuring the success of an SEO project, but it can be cited as an SEO consultant, along with other indicators such as increased visibility or improved positioning.
5. The number of pages viewed per visit
This benchmark shows you on average how many pages a user has visited your website every time someone visits the website. Note that re-accessing a page from a website also measures this criterion.
The question that comes after recognizing this performance index is how logical it is?
Note that the page per session index is completely dependent on the depth and structure of your website, as well as the complexity of the path to your users’ conversion, so a specific number can not be considered for all websites.
If your website is a one-page website, one page per visit will naturally be logical. In this case, it’s best to focus on your website’s performance over time.
Conversely, if your website has multiple contents to provide information to the user, or the owner of a store website where the user is comparing different products, you should expect more pages in the “average number of pages you visit” statistics.
Remember that even if your website’s index has a high performance, it alone does not represent your success rate. Once you’ve turned these visitors into your customers and made important activities like shopping, you’ve reached your goal.
Improving page views compared to previous months can be one of the most important factors related to technical engineering or improvement of the website’s user experience.
6. Average session duration
Another measure of SEO is the average time the user is on your website. Whatever the depth of your website’s content and structure is can effect the time duration on your website.
The reason for the importance of the average user time on a website is to determine the degree of user satisfaction of the quality of the content and its motivation for continuing to appear on your website.
The more satisfying your content is, the user will be more eager to stay on your page, study content and click on your internal links. Be sure to ask yourself if there is a strong drop in the average user timeout rate on a website.
In answering this question, it’s best to redirect the user to the correct direction by fixing the problem by improving the function of the Call Buttons (CTA) and standard internal linking. Also providing valuable content, activating the comments section on the page, and using video can increase the time of users.
When a website’s SEO project is provided to you, you can provide a good report to showcase the impact of your activity by comparing the time that users are present on the pages you have created with the pages already on the website.
7. Page load time
Perhaps this can not be touched in the first place, but increasing the loading time of pages can be a negative and influential factor on all of the key performance indicators we mentioned.
If the page load time exceeds your expectation, you will naturally return to the search engine results page. Simply, if the page load is too long, you will not be interested in continuing to search on that website. Even a higher degree, with the increase of this time naturally, you will not want to buy from this website because your first encounter with this website was unpleasant.
The ideal loading time for any website is directly dependent on the complexity of the content and the patience of your audience, but keep in mind that;
Most users will leave if your website loads more than 4 seconds.
This benchmark is closely related to the key index of user jump rates. Each second you add to your page load, your website jump rate will increase equally. In fact, a website with a 5-second load time would have a 60 percent chance of a higher jump rate than a website with a loading speed of 1 second.
For accurate observation of website loading speed, GTMetrix is the best available tool. This tool will play an important role in improving the loading speed of your pages by displaying the loading speed of the pages and offering suggestions for optimizing the code, content, images and of course the server.
Every time you do an activity on your website, whether you’re planning a page design and uploading a new image, consider the volume and speed of the page load. Optimizing the size of images, content, codes, and the like at the very beginning of the work, is a simpler process compared to a large amount of these cases after experiencing a slowdown.
8. Top exit pages
The exit page is actually the last page a user has before leaving your website.
The key to this performance indicator is that the website’s exit pages are not necessarily bad pages. For example, your exit page may be a thank you page for purchase, or confirmation of purchase. But if most of your users are leaving the website on pages that you did not expect, could indicate a new opportunity to improve website’s UX.
To find the exit pages, you can access them using Google Analytics in the “behavior reports” section and from the “Site content” section.
In this case, there is another indicator called the exit rate, which is measured by comparing the number of users’ exit from one page to the number of visits. If the exit rate of your users is high on a page, optimizing this page can be in your favor.
Before starting an SEO project, you need to carefully analyze the exit pages and record their statistics. When it comes to submitting a report to the employer or the manager of the collection, paying attention to these pages and changing the behavior of users can be your winning sheet to show the achievements of the project.
Conclusion
Using SEO techniques on the website alone cannot reflect the value and impact of your activities in an SEO project. In order to get an understanding of their impact and provide future employers with real and valuable reports, it is best to get a website status report, along with information about the number of visitors and their behavior on the website before the project starts.
In the process of implementing a project using tools such as Google Analytics and the Google Search Console, you can analyze the statistics and show the impact of your activities. Most employers only pay attention to the position of a particular keyword in Google’s results, and improving the rating in competitive terms may take months.
Using the factors outlined in this article, you can provide achievements that do not directly affect the ranking of those phrases but can affect the website’s SEO and conversion rates to the client, so that the employer is aware of the positive results from your wok.
Which of the factors do you think is a good measure for measuring the success of an SEO project? Do you use other methods to analyze your activities and their impact?
