7 awesome steps to measure your SEO

As a blogger or website owner, you must have made a lot of effort researching keywords, writing articles, and indexing them. But how do you track your progress? How do you know your efforts are going in the right direction?

This blog takes you through a 7-step SEO cheat sheet that helps you measure your SEO.

Step 1: Organic Traffic Analysis

Start by measuring your traffic with the help of an Analytics tool. We recommend using Google Analytics. Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.

Google Analytics is used to track website activity such as session duration, pages per session, the bounce rate of individuals using the site, along with the information on the source of the traffic. 📈

An SEO-optimized website will have high session times, low bounce rates and higher traffic.

Step 2: Keyword Rankings on SERP

A higher Google keyword ranking means that a webpage appears closer to the top of the search results, making it more likely to be seen and clicked on by users.

Google offers a tool called Google Search Console that can help you monitor your rankings for specific keywords. It’s also helpful to see the keywords people use to get to your site. You can use it to measure your traffic coming in from Google and see the queries people use and the new keywords that would be best to use on your site. 🔝

An SEO-optimized website will rank higher on Google for its branded and high-intent keywords.

Step 3: Backlink Profile

Your backlink profile is the total collection of backlinks pointing to your website. These links live on other websites and point to yours. A backlink profile details the types of links as well as their anchor text, domain quality, and relevance. An example of a backlink is any article you find that links to another source or website.

Backlink to your website from a webpage that has domain authority is considered valuable from Google. A high authority backlink is a link from any website that has a high domain authority (DA) or high domain rating (DR) score of above 70. You can audit your backlink profile from SEMRush.

An SEO-optimized website will have a good backlink profile and a healthy pipeline of new backlinks from sites with DR>40. 🔗

Step 4: Page Load Time

Page Load Times is another important measure of SEO. Page load speed is a confirmed ranking factor on desktop and mobile. In other words: Faster loading times (along with other important signals) can contribute to higher rankings. Page speed affects your search engine rankings because slow sites negatively affect user experience. 

Page load time is calculated from initiation (when you click on a page link or type in a Web address) to completion (when the page is fully loaded in the browser). You can measure page load times with the help of Google Pagespeed Insights (PSI), which is a free tool that measures a webpage’s performance. It shares valuable information about your page’s performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. 📄

An SEO-optimized website will have a page load time of below 2 seconds. For mobile devices, a page load time of less than 1 second is good. Page load speed can be calculated using performance monitoring tools like Google Analytics and Pingdom.

Step 5: Faster Indexing

Google bot takes a few weeks to index your website, first crawling pages and then indexing them. It takes 2-3 weeks for Google bots to detect and index pages. Slower indexing means your content is not understood by search engines, as a result, your pages don't rank on Google.

Indexly automatically checks your sitemaps, finds new pages, and submits them to Google Search Console, reducing human effort/errors and time to get indexed. Indexed pages rank higher on search engines and boost organic traffic.

Step 6: Bounce Rate and User Engagement

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-engagement visits to your site. That is the number of visitors who come to your page and leave without viewing any other page on your website or engaging with your page in any meaningful way.

If users don't engage on your content they will leave your website. This is considered as Bounce in the SEO terms. A high bounce rate is frowned upon by Google and considers your website does not have meaningful content, as a result, your website will not rank higher on Google. 😄

User engagement is increasingly being recognized as a crucial ranking factor for SEO success. With search engines like Google prioritizing the delivery of the best possible user experience, how well a website engages its audience can directly influence its positioning in search results. For each customer cohort you want to calculate the user engagement for, simply divide the number of active users in a given time divided by the number of total users.

An SEO-optimized website will have a low bounce rate, as a general guideline, a bounce rate of 40% or lower is considered good. Most marketers would consider user engagement of greater than 5% to be good. ✋

Step 7: Conversion Rate

All this for what? Conversions right? All your effort in writing quality content, and maintaining a good experience on your website, is for conversions. It is imperative to measure how many leads get converted to customers and generate revenue for you. For a blogging website, a good conversion measure could be membership or a newsletter signup.

As an example, for a B2B SaaS platform, a good conversion rate (paid customers/ website visitors) is 0.5 - 1%. You could always beat this number by having -

1. Low Page load times < 1sec
2. Low Bounce rates < 40%
3. High User Engagement of >5%
4. Indexed within 24-48 hours
5. Strong back profile
6. Ranks higher (top 10) on your keywords

Conclusion

Now you know how to measure your SEO with this cheat sheet. Is this making you feel confident? I hope you liked this article. 😺 Please share it with your friends 🙏

Happy SEO! 🔔