SEO Metrics To Measure for Small Businesses
Almost all marketers face the problem of opening the analytics suite and facing a confusing pool of graphs, figures, and stats.
Where to start from and which numbers should a small business focus on to get the most profit out of the investments in SEO and digital marketing?
To monitor your business and to make decisions in respect to your business’s online web traffic growth, try prioritizing these five search engine optimization (SEO) metrics –
ORGANIC SEARCH TRAFFIC
Organic Search Traffic refers to visits to your website after somebody conducts a search on google, bing or any other search engine. As this metric is generally the largest source of traffic on the web, firms or businesses should concentrate on organic search traffic to measure growth over time.
According to a 2014 Conductor study, Organic search accounts for around 64% of total website visits.
It depends on your industry as well. Your business will get high search rankings or very low search rankings depending on the competition in your industry – sometimes it can take years while sometimes it takes only a few months. You can promptly earn results by posting engaging content that uses relevant keywords as the other small businesses only target specific specializations.
What does low organic search traffic indicate?
It indicates that you are not showing up well in search results. It could indicate some technical issues on your site, or simply that you have not optimized your website for specific search phrases your target audience uses. Sometimes simply failing to concentrate on the important points that can make the user curious about your site, such as, descriptive page titles and attractive meta descriptions.
REFERRAL TRAFFIC
Referral traffic indicates the visitors to your site from various sources on the internet (and not from searches). If referral traffic is going up this means your target audience is exchanging links to your website. Referral traffic is important for small business marketers as it shows whether they are meeting their audience’s needs.
Small businesses should promote their website actively and should work beyond standing social media platforms to hike their referral traffic. Small businesses can do guests posts on industry blogs to promote their content, mingle on Reddit and forums and work on creating valuable content for your target audience.
BOUNCE RATE
When people do not like your page, they click the red x in the top right corner or the back arrow on the browser; it is called bouncing off the page. A high bounce rate can harm your SEO efforts because this means your page is making less appeal to the audience or it is not meeting their expectations. It also shows that the content on your site is not encouraging users to learn more about your business.
Can this metric be improved?
Yes.
- Make your website more appealing to the eye.
- For better results, add CTA (Call-to-action) buttons on your site to guide the audience to important parts of your website.
- Focus on how the users interact with your website, is it easy to navigate, can all the needed information easily be found within one to two clicks.
VISITOR GROWTH
The overall picture of how your website is growing by tracking organic, referral and non-organic traffic is given by Visitor growth. Hence, it is an important part for small as well as big businesses.
Visitor growth is a broad metric.
You can take actions to prevent an expected drop and potentially, increase the traffic with proper consideration of the visitor growth rate.
Also, the small businesses can divide the visitor growth into returning and new visitors. An increase in new visitors means you have got more audience and have more referrals whereas a hike in returning visitors means your headlines are enticing and you have a dedicated audience.
If you notice a fall in visitor growth then act promptly – target different keywords, create interesting and relevant content.
CONVERSION RATE
If people are just visiting your website but not doing anything then you need to work more. If your website is a clothing store and people are only looking at the products but not buying it, then you will have no profit.
To create conversion points on your website, start setting goals that benefit your company’s business as well. To increase conversions, add clear incentives, like discount price, and share testimonials that make your product authentic. You can also decrease the work of the user by including only the important fields in forms like email address and name.
These five metrics will help you in improving online search visibility of your website and in keeping all the essential SEO benchmarks on track.