I’r sure you’ve heard the quote from Peter Drucker. What gets measured, gets managed. There’s been a huge push these past few years in PR and marketing to show tangible ROI lucky for you SEO is all about results. You can measure, so today’s webinar is going to do a quick overview on four very important metrics.
You should be tracking that will also give you a good idea how your SEO tactics are performing, and maybe even a few ideas on how to improve them. The first metric I want to dive into is keyword rankings. The reason why I’m phrasing this as keyword rankings instead of page rankings is because I want you to think strategically about your keyword choice. You can’t create a page that ranks number 1 on Google for dozens of keywords, but none of those keywords get a lot of traffic or maybe they aren’t relevant to your industry and therefore it really doesn’t produce you anything of value and the people who would find It would bounce quickly off your site and that’s no good.
You need to be optimizing, your site and creating content to rank for the right keywords in order to get qala traffic that will convert. So if you haven’t already create a keyword, mapping report, so you can know what your target keywords are when you’re creating content make sure you spend time finding the right keywords that are feasible to rank for and apply to your audience once you know your keywords, you Can proceed and measuring how well you are doing if you’re familiar with Google Analytics a few years ago, they started to take away your ability, see what keywords you’re ranking for I’m sure you’ve noticed by now the vague not set or not provided terms that now fill That place so I’m going to pull up Google Analytics here and the first thing I want to show you is actually how to see the keywords that are provided on.
Google Analytics, so you’re going to go to acquisition and then all traffic and then blogs. And then, if you go up here to other and click it you can put landing page, this is going to show you keywords by a specific landing page and then on second dimension, do keywords and now you’re going to be able to see once google shows you, The results that the majority of them are not set not provided. However, you can see a few and in order to easily see the ones that you can you’re going to go to the advanced filter here, you’re going to exclude any keywords that can contain not – and that will hopefully knock out any of those very vague keywords that Google is giving you, and now we get to see exactly what some of those pages are ranking for and if you’re looking for a specific page, you can put that URL into advanced filter as well and just search that URL.
Now there are other ways that you can search for keywords that are a little bit more reliable. Another great way is to go to google webmaster tools. If you go to whatever client you’re looking at or your company go to search traffic and then search analytics, you can see what kind of keywords people are typing in in order to get to certain pages. For this one I’d like to usually see their click-through rate or position to see if there’s any low-hanging fruits that might be good to kind of put some SEO, love on and help them get to that first spot, for example, toothache or toothache relief tooth pain.
Even maybe I could focus on a piece of content that relates to these keywords and hopefully build out that keyword base and get to the number one spot. Another great tool to use, but it is paid, is a href and that one they just came out with this. You can see the organic keywords, but what you do is you have to actually type in a specific domain so for this, and I’m doing one clients that it created a infographic, for I want to see what keywords it’s now ranking sensor based in the u.
S. I’r going to choose the u.S. Choice down here and under organic keywords, and it’s going to pop up all those keywords that it’s showing that it’s ranking for even the volume and how many results and when it was last updated. The next keyword tool that I’m going to show you is one that we probably use most at webpage effects for clients rank read, allows you to easily keep track of any keywords that are kind of your goal for ranking in Google or any of the search engines.
The only bad thing about rank read is you actually have to find those keywords, whether it’s through your keyword, mapping report or whether it’s through another tool like eh, Refs or SEM rush to see what exactly you should be putting in and adding to rank read so That it can read your ranks. Of course, this is a paid tool, but it gives you a lot of insight into how many even spaces your keywords are moving up or down, and you can even do a specific keyword that you’re looking for to get a better idea of how your ranking, throughout The month for that keyword, so it’s definitely a great resource to easily keep track of all those keywords.
And, lastly, SEM Rush is a tool that you can use to help see what keywords your ranking for organically for this one. All you have to do is put in the URL just like a H, ref and click organic research, and it’s going to show you all the keywords that that page is ranking for that. So far s DM Rush has catalogued in their system. Now, if you just publish a post – and you look on this, you probably won’t find anything even if you might find that you’re ranking on the web for a few keywords just because they haven’t updated their system.
Yet. The second metric I want to go over is traffic as a result of ranking better. You will see your traffic go up, which is great as long as it’s quality traffic, and there are a few areas that you should be looking to see and determine how your traffic is sending people to your site. Going back to Google Analytics going under acquisition, all traffic and then blogs you’ll once again see that it has a few main default blog groupings.
One is organic search, direct referral, social pay, search and display the ones I want to focus on are organic search, referrals and social. Just to give you a brief synopsis of the other two that I think are worth mentioning here. Direct traffic is when people put your URL into their browser, but it could also mean a few other things, such as clicking a link from an email or a PDF document. Some social media, mobile apps, don’t show up as referral traffic, but instead will show and direct.
So if you’re really curious about where traffic is coming from, you can always create a tagged URL using Google’s URL builder tool, and that will show up in your Google Analytics to help you better track it. Also. Traffic from paid search is a very good to explore, especially if you’re running ads it’ll help you analyze how well your online ad is converting, which is important. Now organic traffic, which you can just click on the blog grouping, and it will show you a little bit more in-depth what kind of pages are ranking organically and also what keywords are doing it.
You can switch to landing page up here under primary dimension if you’d want to see that version of it. So you can tell that a toothache home remedies really is getting a lot of traffic, and we also saw that that was a hot topic in our google webmaster tools for this client, so organic traffic, for those of you who don’t know truck, is traffic. That is coming to you from a search engine, so, for example, if I go to Google, you can see I typed in SEO companies in Harrisburg.
Ideally, you would want to do this in kognito and not signed in to your Google+ account, because Google+ changes, the ways that you see search engine results, but because I have to access the Google Analytics, I’m sign-in at the current moment for this one. What you see at the top here is actually at, and then you see local search, so Google pulls this information in and then organic search comes right here under the local search, and so you see web page FX is ranking on the top two listings there, which Is great for organic, so that’s what organic traffic is and that’s what you’re going to be seeing here.
Is those articles coming there and being clicked for referral traffic? Going back to my blogs here, referral traffic is coming to you from another site, for example, a link that you built in a blog post. People are clicking that link and coming to your site. That’s what you’ll find in a referral traffic and then social traffic is traffic coming to you from social networks like Facebook and Pinterest.
Now, depending on your business, this might not be as an important metric as maybe for a cookware company who does a lot of blogging and does really well on Pinterest and people are coming to their site with recipes or talking about green cookware and then ending up Buying products, because of that social referral, so those are the three that you should probably be checking out regularly. Our third metric that I wanted to go over is links, though sometimes criticized, link building correctly is still one of the best things you can do for your SEO.
Besides optimizing your site in general, you can generally see links impact in the search engine result pages when rankings increase and your domain Authority, which is Mazdas metrics for the overall rankings of your site, increases as well. Like I mentioned and traffic, you can also tell if links are doing a good job, not just with building domain authority and building the rankings to your pages, but also with referral traffic, which is sometimes forgotten about.
When link building. You focus on just getting a link when you should also be focusing on a quality link that will be clicked and then send referral traffic to your site and hopefully those who purchased the product or sign up for our e-newsletter in a way that you can keep Track of them to see your domain Authority, you can download this Moz bar, which shows you the domain Authority, which is also the abbreviated da, which is a 35, which is fairly good.
Most sites rank between 30 and 50. If you have a really good site, it’s it’s up between 50 and 80, usually only ginormous sites that have established a lot of credibility. Have thousands of links reach above that, and you can also see the page rank the abbreviated PA here showing what exactly this pages specific rank is doing? The domain Authority is more of a general overview. Metric Moz also has a spam score, which shows the links coming in if they’re spamming to your side, if you got them from a bad neighborhood, and you can also see how many links are even built to this page.
If you go into this tool the last metric I want to cover our goal. Completions goal completions look different for every business. Some might be just a contact page. Maybe you offer a service so by someone filling out that contact page and inquiring about it. That could be considered a goal, completion and tracked in Google Analytics. Sometimes it can be sitt considered a subscriber to a newsletter, as subscribers are one of the best ways to really get in touch with your target audience.
One of the trends for this year is own. Media companies are building up their blogs and social profiles as a way to establish credibility and thought leadership in their niche, and the most valuable results of this is the email subscribers, which is just a list of emails and names of people who say they are interested In what you do or talk about – and it’s really the perfect potting soil to sow seeds that grow into loyal customers and, of course, there’s the obvious purchases, and you can always track this in Google Analytics by setting up goal completions in your admin tab here, and I would highly encourage you guys to set up as many goal completions as you think would be profitable in determining what type of SEO strategies work, maybe where you need to improve, as you could tell, we have a bunch of them set up for this client here.
Most of the time you’re going to be tracking, actually the Thank You page after someone purchases an item on your site, which is really easy to set up in Google Analytics, and I might actually cover that in a future webinar. Well, thank you, everyone for listening. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at alicia, a li CI a at web page FX, comm,