SEO might be an acronym containing just three letters, but that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t mightily powerful, especially in terms of making your business visible online.
When you work with a digital marketing agency such as ourselves here at Imaginaire, we’ll regularly conduct audits of your SEO strategy. Doing so regularly is essential, otherwise, how can you be sure you’re not missing out on masses of traffic?
Here are some of the top aspects we’ll analyse when monitoring the progress of our efforts, or when working with you as a first time client to see where you’re currently at.
Page Ranking
Did you know the first page of Google captures 71% of all search engine traffic? Given the billions of hits Google receives on a daily basis, this fact is pretty important if you want your website to get noticed.
Ideally, your website as a whole and each of its individual pages should rank between positions 1-10 for the keywords that are most relevant to it.
Writing landing page content is a specialist skill because it doesn’t just involve getting words down on a page, or even checking the spelling and grammar – SEO must be factored into the headings, body copy and metadata too.
Before writing a landing page, research must be carried out to identify the words and phrases that will need to be incorporated into your pages to make them rank highly. It’s not just enough to plonk in the terms with the highest search volumes either, since the content must factor in the user’s search intent. Otherwise, users will land on your page and hop right off again, increasing your bounce rate and pushing your SEO rankings down in the process.
Therefore, you’ll know your SEO strategy is working when your website and pages are ranking highly, or if the position has climbed significantly since a review/website content rewrite was undertaken.
Domain Authority
Domain authority (DA) is a hierarchical system that predicts how likely a website is to rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages). The higher the score the better, with websites that have a domain authority of above 60 considered to have an excellent DA.
When a website is newly created, its domain authority will be on the lower side, especially if it lacks meaningful or relevant content. But with a great SEO strategy, not to mention aspects such as backlinks from other websites and high quality external links, the domain authority will rise.
As a side note, websites with a high domain authority also become more valuable, and any blogs with a high domain authority can command a higher sponsored post fee. Though in terms of SEO specifically, a climbing domain authority is one to aim for as it means you’re getting a lot of other aspects right.
Organic Monthly Traffic
Organic traffic means traffic that originated to your website through unpaid means, i.e, not PPC or Google Ads but through word of mouth, email marketing and of course, good old fashioned SEO!
There’s nothing inherently wrong with having traffic originate from paid sources, as such methods can be essential to spread the word about your products or services, especially for the likes of special promotions whereby you don’t have the time to wait for organic methods to work.
However, organic traffic is considered as extremely valuable, because it paints a true picture of how many hits your website is getting without having to pay to send people there. A strong SEO strategy is the best way to boost your organic website traffic, which is why measuring your monthly organic traffic figures will demonstrate whether your strategy is working or not.
Top Keywords By Country
The country your content is appearing in isn’t always a cause for consideration, though it’s worth exploring when analysing your SEO strategy. This is especially the case for local businesses who don’t trade internationally since ideally, they’ll want the bulk of their web traffic originating from the same country as they are located in, as conversions will be more likely if the two align.
As an example, here at Imaginaire, we are a digital marketing agency based in Nottingham, with the majority of our clients located in the East Midlands in England. So when it comes to our own SEO strategy, we naturally want to focus on Nottinghamshire and the surrounding areas. If our top keywords by country actually showed the majority of visitors originated from America or Canada instead of the United Kingdom, we’d be missing our target demographic and our SEO strategy would need tweaking to align with a local audience.
On the flip side, some businesses may want to attract a wider demographic than just their country of origin. If you consider some of the website giants such as Amazon who operate globally, they can analyse their top keywords by country to see which countries they aren’t ranking in to improve their SEO strategy. Therefore, top keywords by country can be used to boost your SEO strategy in so many ways, yet is frequently overlooked.
Top Pages By Traffic
Moving onto the equivalent of the Oscars but for your website, and top pages by traffic will tell you which pages which are picking up the most traffic for your site. The URL will be displayed, along with the number of page views it receives each month and its general search engine ranking.
Top pages by traffic is one of the easiest ways to see which pages need rewriting, and which should be left alone because they are your best asset, especially if any of your pages hold a number 1 position on Google.
As a business, it can also help you strengthen any underperforming areas of your business. As an example, let’s say that as a digital marketing agency, our ecommerce website design ranked highly, but we found that our branding service page was lagging behind, we could focus our SEO efforts to redress the balance. The same technique can be applied to any website, to ensure your best features are highlighted.
Number Of Backlinks
SEO isn’t just about writing great content that search engine robots will pick up on. Instead, search engines also like it when other websites link to your content.
Let’s be honest, having other websites link to your content is also a huge pat on the back too, especially if the link isn’t sponsored, rather it’s been featured because your website is of genuine help or significance to others.
There’s no set number of how many backlinks to aim for, but the number should ideally be in the tens of thousands at least, especially for more established websites.
Time On Page
The average time users spend on a webpage is thought to be between 10-20 seconds, which isn’t very long at all. However, a great SEO strategy can help extend this time and even lead to a conversion, because you have considered everything from optimising the website design to ensuring the relevancy of the content.
A sign that your SEO strategy is working is if the page browse time is either high or has increased since recent changes to the content have been implemented. Also look out for a sudden drop in how long people spend on the page, as this could indicate recent changes backfired, or that there is a technical problem with the page.
Conversions
Conversions aren’t something that can be tracked directly with SEO software, but they are something to keep an eye on, especially if your SEO strategy has recently been overhauled.
Going back to using ourselves here at Imaginaire as an example, if we created a push for our SEO services in Nottingham, and found that after 6 months of updating our content, we gained an influx of local clients then it’s safe to say the changes were a success.
Also, for any businesses which sell products directly through your website, you can often track the referral link. If your pages happen to be pulling in higher amounts of traffic since your SEO strategy was updated, this is another sure sign things are moving in the right direction.
SEO Nottingham – SEO Agency UK
Need help making sense of your SEO, or perhaps you’re starting from scratch with your strategy and don’t want to waste time trying to climb the ranks? Imaginaire is here to help!
We offer SEO as part of our wide range of digital marketing services. We’re based in Nottingham, working with clients across the East Midlands and beyond through the engineering, construction, jewellery, retail and luxury e-commerce sectors.
Simply book your free consultation and we’ll get to work on devising a strategy tailored to your business. Or, drop us an email or call us on 0115 971 8908 to find out more.
You can even get a free website review from our specialists. Just head over to our free website review page and we’ll take a look!