Do you find search engine optimization difficult? Don't worry, just set clear goals when dealing with SEO, and then measure your progress with each step you take.
In this article, we will talk about the importance of setting goals, and we will highlight the mechanisms for achieving the desired success, how to measure it, and the tools that can help you in doing so.
Set realistic SEO goals
After you set your SEO goals, you can then measure, track and report on the results to see which steps are successful and which ones need improvement.
This will help you make the necessary adjustments to advance your SEO process. Let's start by setting goals:
- What do you want to achieve online?
- How do you know success?
Let's say you own a small farm and you want to sell vegetables and fruits to as many customers as possible, and at the same time you seek to build relationships with existing customers with good content in order to get them to come back to your website to buy more of your crop.
You've just set three goals for your business:
- Conversion: converting your website visitors into customers who use your products
- Interaction: encouraging users to interact with the content of your website.
- Acquisition: what is meant here is to attract new customers
Setting SEO goals gives you new items to measure, thus helping you understand whether or not your website is doing its part.
Don't waste your energy on keywords that have nothing to do with what you're doing
How do you know if the steps you took were correct?
Some metrics gain more importance than others. For example, it's great to be number one in the search engine rankings, but this is not a sign of your success. Why?
Let's say your farm website tops the list of results when someone searches using the phrase “grow vegetables.” This ranking helps you increase traffic to your site but not necessarily increase sales.
It is possible that the researcher wants to know how to grow vegetables only and does not want to buy your fruits or vegetables.
So the lesson is: Don't waste your energy on keywords that have nothing to do with what you're doing.
Other methods you can use to measure your level of success
If the search results are not the goal, then what should you strive for? Let's look at other methods you can use to measure your level of success.
Do you remember those goals you set above?
- Let's start with conversion, you can measure your conversion level by tracking the number of visitors who visited your website and bought fruits and vegetables; or track those simple actions that might lead to purchases, such as subscribing to your email newsletters.
- In terms of acquisition, you can measure your level of acquisition by tracking the number of times your business appears in search results ie “impressions”, as well as the number of times users click to visit your website.
- Finally, interaction, you can measure the level of interaction by tracking the content that visitors read and interact with, such as writing comments, or tracking the number of visitors who have started following your pages on social networks
How do you keep track of all of these items?
Analytical and webmaster tools provided by search engines can provide you with this information and are often also free.
Most major search engines like Bing or Google offer similar tools, which are basically a set of reports and services that help you track and monitor how well your website appears in search results.
These tools tell you which keywords put your website in search results, which links are leading to your site, and how many visitors click on those links.
This is valuable information if your goal is to attract customers looking for certain phrases.
You can also use analytical tools to better understand the behavior of your visitors, as they can answer questions such as:
- How many users visited your site thanks to organic search results and became a customer?
- Which web pages or content on your website has turned visitors into buying customers?
- What is the content that does not achieve the desired well?
By knowing this information you will be able to adjust your SEO strategy for better performance (or evaluate the performance of the agency you have appointed to help you with SEO).
Summary
Clearly define your goals for search engines so that you can monitor your site's performance in organic search results and how it contributes to your business.
To measure the level of success or know the points that need improvement, track your performance at various levels.
Only when your goals are clear will the trackers work properly thus ensuring that you are on the right path in SEO.