How To Evaluate SEO Success? Semalt SEO Tools That'll Come In Handy



One of the main problems when working with website optimization is how to evaluate your actions. Unlike campaigns in advertising systems, which usually allow you to measure the success very accurately and compare it to the costs incurred, measuring the success while working on the optimization of your website is not so simple. In the article below, we have tried to gather and briefly describe popular tools used to measure the effectiveness of website optimization.

What do we need to know about evaluating SEO performance?

Almost every brief that Internet marketing agency employees meet contains the magic word - website traffic. All the work of the global SEO industry is aimed at gaining traffic for customers from free organic search engine results, so it is the first what we see after well-made changes to the site. Search engine traffic has always been linked to keywords - the core of the modern search engine world.

That is why keywords placed on your site should be always carefully analyzed. In the context of assessing the effectiveness of website optimization, we can divide them into competitive and non-competitive keywords. Competitive words, for which we optimize, should be selected not only in terms of the volume of searches but also their potential. 

Based on the increase in popularity or the expected trend in the search and the intentions of the people who search for them, knowing the "sales funnel" model and the way users use the search engine, we can assess which keywords will bring valuable traffic and which will likely end up with an increase in the bounce rate and a decrease in users' time on the site. Keyword monitoring is one of the widely used KPIs that companies investing in organic traffic from search engines still choose.

Domain age

The effects of individual activities should also be distinguished in the context of the age of the domain, or rather the time in which it functions in search engine indexes. Domains whose content has been indexed in the search engine for a long time should be treated differently than newly created websites of companies or stores. 

The implementation of optimization recommendations and relevant content on the website starts with a long way of indexing, analyzing, and positioning for individual words. It rarely happens that a restarting page gets a high position for the keywords it contains. The same happens in the case of migration from one address to another, where old addresses 301 or 302 redirected to the new site help to recrawl the page.

Research carried out by the Dedicated SEO Dashboard - one of the popular tools, that has a huge global database on the visibility of pages in the search engine and the changes that take place in them, shows that pages that occupy the top positions in the search engine are present on the web for 800 to almost 950 days.



The data is of course statistics, and the taken positions and their changes in the search engine depend on many other factors, but the research can draw a clear conclusion: it is better to improve our site sooner than the competition will do.

How long does it take to make a good assessment?

The assessment of the progress for new pages is always difficult - "getting to know" the page and its content by Google can take up to six months, and it takes 60 to 120 days for about 40% of pages and 120-180 days to be in the top 10 results for about 20% of pages that were found in TOP10. Only about 10% of the pages appear in the top 10 within 2 months.

Experience shows that the first six months of the website's operation is the time to convince Google's algorithms that our website contributes more to Internet users than competing websites.

It is worth paying attention to the activity of Googlebot within our website - because long-term waiting for an effect, without taking any action, may be counterproductive. Non-updated pages may be considered abandoned. The complete lack of changes to the site, failure to develop internal linking, and not seeking interest in our site by other Internet users may cause the indexing schedule for our site to drop to zero, and thus the activity of Googlebot on our site will be limited to one or several visits per week. Active site management allows us to maintain a good pace of crawling our site and achieve the results we expect faster. 

Moreover, a good result of the optimization work is not only defined by changes in keyword positions, but also updating the website and maintaining good content. Patience in SEO is a great virtue, which should also result in the natural interest of Internet users in our website.

SEO auditing and monitoring tools

The desired effect for all SEO activities is to increase traffic and achieve the chosen goal on the website. To measure how visitors behave on our website, you can use the Dedicated SEO Dashboard tool. With this tool you can:
  • collect key data for your business;
  • recognize and distinguish the origin of traffic, compare data from different periods and measure sales data;
  • check the value of contacts, leads, events, and above all, sales value.
Moreover, the use of the Dedicated SEO Dashboard tool in the assessment of changes in organic traffic allows you to view and segment data about website traffic and user behavior within the website. It allows you to check the landing pages visited by users, changes in the number of sessions of subpages responsible for the achievement of our goals, the flow of users between individual sections and subpages of the website.

It is especially important for the evaluation of SEO impact on e-commerce websites to monitor elements related to sales paths, quality, and effectiveness of entry and exit pages from the website. This allows you to later diagnose problems that users encounter during the purchase decision or the transaction itself, and to develop recommendations to seal your site and turn site traffic into achieving your goal.

A broader look at the presence in the search engine

The selection of keywords is a certain direction in which we follow the subsequent activities related to the technical optimization of the CMS and the optimization of the content on the website. However, it is worth remembering that ultimately the keywords through which people find our site are determined by the search engine's algorithm. 

To monitor our online presence, Semalt's SEO experts creating SEO tools, have developed visibility measurement systems such as the Dedicated SEO Dashboard. This is a paid tool for monitoring changes in visibility, search seasonality, and popularity of individual keywords.

In addition, the analysis of our website through the prism of matched keywords and comparison to the competition allows you to diagnose problems with a decrease in website traffic, a high bounce rate.

It is important when analyzing visibility to look not only at the current state, but also at historical changes. In this way, you can search for technical problems related to the operation of the website, server, changes made to the code or the way the website works, etc. Historical changes in visibility are also a hint during site audits or off-site work, i.e. checking whether obtaining links for the site did not cause penalties and whether individual algorithm updates translated into profits or losses for our site. 

Observing your website's visibility is definitely an easier and more visual way to measure SEO effectiveness in terms of keywords.

Conclusion

Evaluating SEO performance requires not only appropriate tools to check the changes made on the site, but also to compare the changes made with the level of achievement of the goal we set. They can be:
  • Increase in key performance indicators within the website (including traffic, conversion and, for example, selling or performing an appropriate reaction with the website).
  • Increase in indicators related to the presence of the site in the search engine index (site performance, increase in visibility, increase in average positions, and CTR).
We have briefly introduced the SEO Dedicated Dashboard as the SEO performance measurement tool available on the market. In addition to being an SEO performance measurement tool, the Dedicated SEO Dashboard has many other powerful features that you can use to implement a good SEO strategy.

With this tool, you can:
  • Know the competitors in the right niche and their SEO strategies
  • Make a competitive analysis
  • Have an in-depth audit of the site
  • Check the speed of the site and have suggestions to improve the loading time
  • Check the uniqueness of the site
  • Create a schedule for the distribution of reports
  • Benefit from a partnership program to be a reseller
To learn more, you can dive into these data-driven tool features at demo.semalt.com.

It is extremely important when working on developing your online business, that you use the right tools. This will allow you to choose the right goals and know how to reach them, define KPIs and on this basis, prepare a good strategy.