Gauging Your SEO Results

I guess all of us have a fair idea of what SEO is all about. And quite frankly, performing SEO of a website isn’t difficult. However, tracking its result is quite an intricate process and is troublesome to many of us. So, how do we know the results of the efforts put by us? How do we measure the performance of SEO?

1. Traffic Numbers

   The amount of traffic your website or blog is attracting per day gives you a fair idea of its performance. More number of visitors means more SEO is being performed on the website. However, there are 3 elements of traffic:

   • Page Views
   • Visits
   • Originating IPs

   If you are tracking it appropriately, you will be able to gauge:

   • people visiting your site
   • Increase in number of readers and commentators

2. The Crawling Activity

   People generally believe a good design, content, and proper SEO is necessary to attract traffic. To some extent, it’s true. People, however, forget the main component: the crawling frequency.

   Most of the traffic is directed through search engines. And if you want your website to be on the top, it has to be crawled frequently. Here is a little secret: more videos means more crawling.

   If there is a sharp increase in crawling frequency, the search engine is constantly noticing that your website has quality content and is quite eager to check every page you upload. Inversely, a plummeting frequency is a bad sign. Search engine is not much interested in your site and is looking elsewhere for better quality.

3. Hits on your URL

   Few pages of your website are more popular than the others. No, this isn’t just co-incidence. It’s because you have done right in those pages, and that x-factor is missing in other pages. Try to find out what’s missing and adopt the style.

4. Referrer

   I don’t know about other SEO experts, but I like to learn the source of reference. This means a place from where the traffic is being directed. You have written, for instance, a guest post on your friend’s blog and a large amount of traffic is directed from the post. Tracking this source and gauging its significance is quite important to trace the overall performance of your SEO. This will help you to allocate time spent on writing guest post or any other reference points.

5. Search Strings

   This is something I forgot to mention on the top. Search Strings are more important than your Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP). This tells you a lot about your SEO than any other component. So, in order to drive more traffic, you can:

   • Try to find innovative ways or explore new search strings
   • Find if the strings matches the ones of your site
   • Consequently, adjust your SEO method

6. Visitors

   Along with gauging your SEO result, sometimes, it also becomes quite important to know where your visitors are coming from. If you are into an e-commerce business, knowing your visitor’s location is quite important. For instance, if your local business is in South America, and most of your visitors (say 90%) are from Australia, it’s useless.

In conclusion, there is actually much more you can do to gauge the performance of your SEO than just checking SERP.