We all use standards to measure something. We use standards to measure our performance at work, to gauge sales volume, and many other things including personal accountability.
If you are looking to handle your own online marketing and really want to try SEO in Sacramento, you need standards to track your results. Specifically, we need standards to measure how our SEO efforts are performing. Which ones do we use, though, and why? An article from Search Engine Watch gives four general standards to use:
Referrers
Referrers are links that identify the website our visitors came from. We think of those referrers as people who referred others to us via word of mouth, except online. We look for sub-metrics like traffic per referrer, trust flow of referrer, time on site from referrer, and conversion rate from referrer.
Social Sharing
Some of us see those “Like” or “Share” buttons in some websites to share in social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others like them. We track them to see how many people like our content enough to share it with others in social media. Context is critical, however, to figure out the value of social sharing and to repeat those results. We look for referring platforms and social shares.
Engagement
Earlier, we said context is critical. Sometimes, people don’t just share our content in Facebook or Twitter; they also comment or engage them too. We can track these engagements happening in social media, and tracked figures from these engagements are often an indication of how well our content is working. Three things we can look for are pages per visits, time on site, and bounce rates.
Conversions
Conversions, or conversion rates, are the completion of activities on our sites that are important to our businesses; examples of conversion rates are email list subscriptions, buyer guide downloads, and retargeting pixel drops. Conversions are important to measure because they translate to things like leads and sales. We track primary and secondary conversion rates per content type.
Google analytics is free and has a lot of great tracking information. They can show you website traffic, keywords people use (some of them for now at least), referrers, conversions. social media and more. Facebook offers free info via their Insights tool. Other free social measuring tools are Hootsuite (which you can use to schedule your posts as well), Social Mention, Tweetdeck and Klout.
Thanks to the Internet, search engines, and social media sites, we now have ways to measure our SEO efforts. If we want others to handle those tasks for us, we can always seek a Sacramento SEO expert such as Champion Online Marketing to take care of that job.
(Article Excerpt and Image from 11 Must-Measure KPIs for Content Marketing Success, Search Engine Watch, November 27, 2013)