Introduction to SEO Performance Tools
SEO is seen as a method to increase site traffic. But before achieving site traffic, there are a lot of steps involved. Measuring the success of an SEO greatly depends on the type of business you run and its objectives. If you can measure the success, then you can improve it. SEO measurement is one of the critical factors in determining success. SEO professionals track data about ranking and others to measure the SEO strategy, which will lead to success. Business planning not only involves sketching the business goals but also includes the factors that help to drive success to those goals. This is very crucial when it comes to achieving online goals. Organizations are unlikely to achieve their goals without a proper understanding of the metrics that help to achieve success is the SEO performance definition.
Top 10 SEO Performance Tools
There are three main factors that should be taken into account when measuring SEO success.
- Rankings
- Traffic
- Conversions
These factors not only measure SEO success but also provide you with some ideas to improve your marketing strategy. There are also a lot of other factors that can be used to measure SEO success.
1. Rankings
Keyword ranking is the most important KPI. This is because researchers indicate that 92% of the traffic from Google goes to the websites that are listed on the first page of Google. Keyword tracking helps to redefine your SEO strategy and it will also help you to know which keyword requires more attention and which keyword can drive more traffic to your site it is a short SEO performance definition.
It is very important to know how your website is performing in search engine results when compared with competitor’s sites.
Users are more attracted to a website that is listed on the first page of Google or any search engine. If your site is listed on the first page then it increases the awareness about the firm’s brand.
Some keywords might be too competitive, and they also do not return enough benefits. Leave behind such keywords and focus only on those which will help you to get into top positions.
Keeping track of keywords is very important, but at the same time, you should also be able to transform such keywords into more attractive ones to bring more traffic to your site.
There are a few things to consider in Keyword ranking
- Know your target audience
- Keep track of the improvement in the ranking
- Whether proper internal linking is done
How to track keyword rank?
Keyword ranking can be tracked using SEO performance tools that are available on the market. However, Google does not provide any metric to track the keyword ranking. If you choose the right kind of tool, it will be easy to track, and some tools also convert their results into action plans that can be used by business people to improve their websites is an SEO performance definition
2. Search Engine Traffic
Another equally important factor in improving your SEO is search engine traffic. After the website has reached the first-page position in a search engine, it is very crucial to note what amount of traffic it drives to the website. First-page rankings are considered waste if they don’t drive more traffic to the site, which is their main purpose. SEO Performance of a keyword is always measured by means of traffic it generates to your site
- Traffic Volume
Traffic Volume is measured by the total number of visits that come through organic search.
Now, what is organic traffic?
Organic traffic is the traffic that is gained from non-paid search results. It is a direct target and is also free of cost. Organic traffic is further divided into two groups – branded keywords and non-branded keywords.
Branded keywords are the ones that are used specifically for a type of business and is unique. They offer better results than other keywords. This will also let you know whether the browser is familiar with your product or brand as they type in the brand or product in the search box of the search engines. Such search queries will also offer better results in the search engine page.
Non-branded keywords are the area where an SEO person should focus more. These keywords will let you know how effective is your SEO campaign. Because these keywords derive traffic from people who do not know anything about your business or product but still enter your site.
- Traffic Quality
The quality of traffic is another important section that needs careful monitoring of SEO performance analysis. There are few factors that determine the quality of traffic, and it include
- Pages Per Visit
- Average Visit Duration
- Bounce Rate
There is a problem with your SEO and site if
- Pager Per Visit is low
- Average Time Duration is low
- Bounce Rate is High
The quality of traffic will be more only if the keywords are more targeted and they are delivering what the users want. Quality traffic is the main factor that converts a user into a customer.
3. Conversions
The ultimate goal of SEO is conversions. Conversions are described based on business goals. Conversions can be directed towards the goal. For example, if the goal of your SEO campaign is to increase the leads, then you can concentrate on contact requests, appointment requests, phone calls, and other communication areas. There is also a different type of conversions that take place.
- Conversions from Organic Traffic Sources
You should first know what source you are deriving more traffic. In case the organic traffic is driving more traffic, then it means that monitoring SEO’s performance is good and it attracts relevant and targeted users.
- Conversions from Referrals and Social Sources
Suppose you are getting more traffic from other sources like social networks and others. In that case, it means that your Off-site SEO campaigns like content marketing and brand promotion, are performing more effectively and reaching the right type of audience.
The conversions, if converted in monetary terms it will help you to determine the Return On Investment (ROI) from your SEO campaign. ROI can also be determined based on a customer’s lifetime value. This means you should consider not only the first purchase of a customer but you should also take into account the repeated purchase of a customer to know the exact ROI.
A higher conversion rate always means that the traffic is more relevant to your business and the site is performing better to achieve the business goals.
4. Domain Authority
Domain authority compares your website monitoring SEO performance with that of your competitors’ sites in search engine rankings. Domain authority depends on your site pages and link profiles. Domain authority can be measured using 150 different factors based on the SEOmoz model. Domain Authority rankings is a predictive ranking system that is used to measure the website’s strength. Domain Authority also analyzes a site’s interpreted trust. If the domain authority ranks higher, it means that the site is more trustworthy. Domain Authority ranking can be formed into SEO system measurements.
5. Engagement
Every user who visits your site is different. You cannot convert every visitor into your customer. Engaging a visitor on your site will not have a direct effect on conversions. But if a visitor is engaged with your site for the long term, then it definitely is. Thus, people who purchase from your site should be given equal importance to the ones who have started researching on your site. Engagement can also be measured using factors like bounce rate, time spent on the page, and the number of pages visited during the visit.
6. Analytics Programs to measure SEO
There are a lot of applications available which help to measure the success of the SEO campaign. Top search engines like Google and Bing also offer such analytics programs along with other SEO consulting firms. This analytics program lets you track the on-page and off-page SEO activity. These programs will offer you all the details from the type of browser to the user’s page visits on the site. These data can be helpful to improve the site as well as test the ability of the changes that are made to the site.
A few of the analytics applications include Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster tool, KISSmetrics, and a lot more. Google Analytics is the most commonly used and popular analytics program. It has many advanced features and a reporting system.
There are also several free and paid applications available to analyze the contents of a site and metatags separately. These tools can help SEO professionals to edit the HTML to improve SEO performance.
There are several reports generated by SEO performance tools
7. Acquisition
The acquisition report offers the acquisition, behavior, and conversion of the users all in a single window. The acquisition report will help you to know how the visitors come to your site, their behavior on your site, and their conversion rate. This report will show the channel from which most of the visitors have arrived at your site. This will help you to know which channel to concentrate more on your SEO activities. The conversion rate will help you to know the success of your business.
8. Behavior
Understanding the users of your business is a more important factor in calculating the success of SEO-performing tools. Analyzing the behavior of visitors will let you find out the pages that are frequently visited by the users and allow you to optimize the navigation within the site.
9. Search Queries
Search queries are the terms that the users enter in the search box of the search engines. The impression data, keyword position, and Click-Through Rates (CTR) are the factors used to determine the position of a site. Search queries can be divided into different pages of the site so that it will be easy to identify for which term that particular term gets clicked by the visitor and what is its ranking.
Search queries can help you to know the estimated rank and CTRs. Webmaster tools can be used to do this comparison.
10. Backlinks
A backlink is another important component for monitoring SEO performance tools. Quality links will bring in a higher ranking to the site in SERP and referral visits. There are also some key elements that can be used while analyzing backlinks. They are
- Referring Domain Count – This tells you the number of unique domains that are linked to your website. If the count is higher, it means your site is more popular.
- Backlink Count – Tells you the number of links per page
- Backlink Type – Tells you the type of Backlinks created
- Anchor Text Distribution – Will help to find out the Referring Domain Count using a percentage of distribution
Other SEO Performance Tools Measurement Standards
Other SEO performance tools measurement standards are as follows
- Website Load time
- Google Indexed Pages
- Goal Completions
- Keyword Click through
- Landing Pages performance
- Social Media Engagement
- Inbound links from Unique Domains
- Site visits
- Google Analytics Page Impressions
- Incoming Links count
- Local Business Citations acquired
- Assigning Dollar values to Organic traffic
- Hosting Server Performance
SEO Performance Tools
There are a lot of SEO tools that will help you measure the ranking capacity of your website and web pages. A few of the SEO performance tools are listed below for your reference
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Moz
- Google Keyword Planner
- Screaming Frog
- Bing Webmaster tools
- io
- Google Trends
- Way Back Machine
- Hootsuite
- GTmetrix
Conclusion
After reading this article, you will come to know the important factors to be focussed on while monitoring SEO performance. You can always improve your website’s quality by monitoring SEO performance. Track your data frequently and compare them with previous results. This will help to convert all your efforts into profits. Measuring SEO performance tools will also help you make smarter decisions about SEO strategy.
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