Is your SEO hot or not? Let’s see if your site measures up.
You’ve learned about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), followed the steps to optimize your site, but now, how do you know if it’s working? One of the main reasons why SEO is so powerful and popular is because these measurements, also known as analytics, tell you the performance of your site’s SEO.
Setting goals for your SEO
It’s been said many times before that success is only success if you can measure it. That’s especially true for SEO. The basic goals of any SEO effort are to:
- Increase the visibility of your website on search engines
- Increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website
- Get your visitors to do things you want them to do when they visit your site
The measures of success
To determine whether you’ve achieved your goals, you need to analyze:
- Page Views: This is the most basic measurement in SEO. Page views are simply the number of times your pages are viewed by people who browse the Web. Page views count all views, including multiple views by the same person. Unique page views, or page views that are filtered to only first-time views, provide a more accurate picture.
- Visitors: This is the number of people who have visited your site in a given amount of time.
- Impressions: The number of times your site appeared in the first three pages of search results are the impressions for a given search engine.
- Conversions: A conversion occurs when anyone who visits your Web site engages in a desired behavior. That behavior typically means buying your product or service, but it can be any other behavior, such as filling out a contact form, subscribing, or downloading a file. Increasing those conversions is the ultimate goal of any SEO effort.
SEO analysis and measurement tools
Here are some free tools to measure your SEO efforts, along with resources for more information about SEO analytics:
Learn more about analytics
Google Analytics also offers multiple ways to get data on your site. To add Google Analytics, read the tutorial to see how it’s done.