Search engine optimization (SEO) has become one of the most important marketing tools available. That’s true if you run a small mom-and-pop store or a large enterprise. Ultimately, your customers must be able to find you online in order to do business with you. Hiring a marketing company to help you improve your SEO services can greatly benefit you, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience in this area. But this lack of expertise can make it difficult to know whether you’re getting the most value for your money.
So, it’s important to understand how to check the success of the campaigns your SEO partner is running. Take a look at a few items that can help you understand whether you are getting the most out of SEO services from a search engine marketing partner.
Understanding SEO basics
Since its inception in the mid-1990s, SEO has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar business every year. That’s unsurprising given that Google processes over 3.3 billion searches each day worldwide. It also accounts for about 88% of all internet search traffic.
In order to appear at the top of one of these searches and actually compete in your industry, you have to optimize your website for search engines.
SEO is a multi-faceted approach to ensure that your website reaches the top of organic search engine rankings. To offer the most return on investment and enable the greatest results, your SEO services provider should work to:
- Evaluate your website and update content. The information about your products and services must be clear to consumers and search engine bots.
- Create new content that includes keywords and information valuable to your consumers.
- Add or update metadata on the back end of your website. This information tells search engines what they can expect to find on each page and makes it easier for them to “crawl” your site and index it for search. It includes things like your URL, meta title, meta description, H1, and H2 tags, content, images, and links.
- Evaluate your navigation and site structure to create the best user experience. This means people can easily browse your site to find what they need.
- Optimize your site for mobile devices so people can easily browse the site from a smartphone or tablet.
Key metrics to measure the success of your SEO services
If you’re like most companies that decide to outsource SEO, you’re doing it to augment your expertise or manpower in this area. While you don’t need to become an SEO expert, there are some basics you should understand to make sure you’re getting what you expect from your SEO provider. Here are some key metrics that all good SEO services should be able to show you:
- Conversions: How well is your SEO bringing in new qualified leads and/or sales? To properly measure this, you should have a baseline that you can benchmark against from before you started using the SEO services.
- Organic traffic: How much has your organic traffic grown since you’ve engaged with the SEO partner?
- Keyword rankings: Where do you show up in search results for specific keywords that you’re trying to target?
- Links: How many links are you getting, and what is the quality of those links? Links are only useful for SEO when they are for quality sites.
- Bounce rates: How many of the people who land on your page leave right away? If it’s high, that’s a sign that you’re not attracting qualified leads and quality traffic.
- Average time on page: Once people get to your site, do they spend time on it? Do they browse multiple pages? This is a good indication of quality leads. Again, benchmark time on page before you engage with your SEO services and after to see if it’s improving.
How the right SEO gives you the best ROI
The right SEO strategy can help customers find you and generate more qualified leads. Companies should think of SEO the same way they think about all marketing, in terms of the return on investment. One significant benefit of SEO services is the ability to track the online activity of your customers — where they go, what they click, and whether they take specific actions like making a purchase. With this information, you can attach a specific dollar value to the leads or sales your SEO generates.
Ready to kickstart your SEO? Find out how EXTEND GROUP can help you improve your overall online marketing with exceptional SEO services. Contact us today to discuss your needs.
