How to evaluate SEO success
I’ve heard so many stories of business owners paying for SEO services from an individual or a firm and not feeling like they are getting a payout for the money they have invested. This is so unfortunate and I do genuinely feel for those business owners, so I put together a quick guide of some things I check when monitoring if the SEO implemented on a website. This guide is a how-to for anyone who is attempting their own SEO or double checking someone else’s SEO efforts.
Understand your business goals and objectives
The first place I start when evaluating SEO performance is to get an understanding of what my client’s business is trying to accomplish. If the website is primarily focused on e-commerce, then I will move forward with an understanding that encouraging a sale takes precedence. If my client is in a service industry than I want to make sure that the customer engaging with the website books an appointment or calls my client over a competitor.
Narrow down your website pain points
My due diligence as an SEO specialist requires me to make sure that the site has all of the tools necessary to measure user engagement so I can better understand how your customer is interacting with the website. This allows me to narrow down any pain points they may be experiencing that would prevent a conversion or sale. These metrics will include how much time is spent on the page, how many pages are gone through per visit, the overall bounce rate as well as scroll depth. Google Analytics is the ideal place I would gather this information from however, additional user experience tools like Mouseflow can help me see first-hand how customers are interacting with the website. If the pinpoints that the client is experiencing amount to serious loss in traffic or sales and a rebuild is necessary I will continue to approach that with UX Design in mind. Utilizing A/B testing and getting first hand feedback from users on the website through tools like User Testing will help both myself and the design teams put together a website that will help you accomplish our goals.
Evaluate user activity
Next, I want to see how your site ranks overall and how those rankings are transferring to click through rates. My top priority is making sure the customer is getting directed to the answers they are seeking or the product/ service they need. Utilizing Google Tag Manager can help me deploy metrics that will help me better understand the activity of customers on the website through event tracking. This will help me see for example, that your customers clicking on say a YouTube video explaining how your product works, how long they are watching that video for, and if they are interested in exploring deeper into your website. All of this information is displayed in Google Analytics and can be easily accessed.
Monitor your website health
The overall heath and maintenance of the website plays a critical role in SEO performance and Google Search Console can help me see any website errors (mobile visibility issues, indexing issues, rich snippet coding mistakes, robots.txt errors, or critical errors such as a hack) as well as help me find opportunities for improvement and see keywords that customers are using to find the website organically. In addition to GSC, various tools such as WooRank, Web.dev, or even google lighthouse tools can help diagnose website errors that may be affecting how easily your website can be accessed and used.
Check through your website backlinks
I will also do a thorough backlink analysis to make sure that all links and root domains look to be from legitimate and quality sources. If any look to be a bit sketchy, (i.e. a toxic website with inappropriate content advertising links to your site hoping to capitalize on the work you have done to maintain authority), Ahrefs has an excellent tool to help me narrow down which links may be toxic so I can submit a disavow to Google. Once the disavow is submitted, Google they will no longer consider those links as relevant when crawling your site. What this means is that while those links may not disappear they are considered non-existent and will no longer be taken into consideration as far as your website authority is concerned.
Audit your website meta data
It is extremely important to keep an up to date audit on the website Page Titles/Meta Descriptions as well as website content. I want to make sure that the objective of each page is accurately summarized and written in a way to entice a customer to click through when on the SERP and linger on the page. Performing a competitive analysis of my client’s direct competitors can help me discover what additional can be improved to better target the needs of the user. In addition, optimizing titles/descriptions correctly can give the site a better chance of gaining access of the coveted Answer Box.
Keep your content up to date
Keeping up to date with website content is another incredibly important factor for performance. I will constantly perform content audits based around what customers are looking for in my clients industry as well as what customers are searching for to find either the website or our competitors websites. Utilizing this information will ensure that customers are having a great experience on the website and are getting value from reading the content we provide. It will also help me better understand the industry so I can help my client stand out from their competition.
Page Speed, Schema Markup, ect.
Some other important things to note: Page speed performance (Are CDN’s necessary? Do my images need to be compressed? How can my code be optimized to load quicker?) Schema Markup so I can take advantage of the extra space I can gain in the SERPs, Crawlability, and Domain Authority, as well as keeping up with the latest Google algorithm updates.
At the end of the day what I strive to do for my client is to make the website invaluable to the customers in which they serve. As I mentioned at the top it is important to use SEO to help users find your site however building a sustainable business strategy involves keeping your customers engaged enough to find value and convert which will provide long lasting value. You want your customers to depend on you for information they cannot find anywhere else and that is what I try to provide as an SEO.