Too many factors – Prioritize
A site traffic analysis package like Google Analytics provides lots of matrices to you. If you check each of them daily, you would not be able to do anything else!
The way out is to prioritize and look at the most important factors every day. The others can be observed once a week or once in two weeks.
So, what are the factors that you should be monitoring daily to check your SEO effectiveness? Here we go.
Keywords used by people to find your site on search engines
This is the most important factor, and I am sure this is something that most of you would be already monitoring!
This list shows you which terms people are using in search engines to find your blog or website.
(Image source)
Here is what you can do through this list:
- Once you know what terms are popularly being used to arrive at your blog, you can fine-tune your posts or pages for them for a further increase in traffic
- When you see a high bounce rate for some terms and phrases, you can check your posts and rewrite them such that they cater better to topics related to those terms
- You get ideas for writing new posts from the search phrases people use – what can be better than writing a post that answers a reader’s direct query?
Top landing pages
This is a list of pages that people have used to enter your blog or website. That is, this is a list of pages that people first arrived at on your blog. It can be through a search engine result page (SERP), or through a link from some other blog or website.
Why is this list important?
- You can fine-tune these posts or pages (for the search terms used by your visitors) for a further increase in traffic (Check out “Keyword placement – where to put the keywords in a post” for more)
- Once you know some posts are good entry points to your blog, you can provide links to other relevant content from these posts and pages
Referring sites
Apart from the traffic from search engines, people would also be coming to your blog through external links. This is a list of such blogs and websites that have been referring people to your blog.
This list will show you the effectiveness of your link building efforts.
If you have been commenting on other blogs and website for getting traffic and backlinks, you can also judge how effective it has been.
Sources of traffic to your site – breakup
This is a breakup of your traffic as per the source – it generally divides you traffic as:
- Referred by search engines
- Referred by other blogs and websites
- Direct traffic (people who typed in your blog URL in the browser address bar)
This shows you mow much traffic you are getting from different sources.
If search engine traffic shows an increase over a few days and weeks, it means that your SEO efforts have been effective.
If referral traffic (visitors referred to you blog by other blogs and websites) shows an increase over a few days and weeks, it means that your efforts for getting backlinks have been successful.
Average time on site
This factor indicates the average time spent by a visitor on your blog or website per visit. The higher this number, the more interesting (or sticky) is your blog for readers.
When people spend more time on your site, it implies that they are getting a good experience on your site – both in terms of content and usability.
Both these are extremely important in the eyes of search engines like Google. We have discussed this earlier – please check out:
| This blog uses Market Samurai – The Best Keyword Research & Analysis Tool Available | |
| Market Samurai empowers you to achieve quick, easy, profitable front-page rankings on Google. Market Samurai helps you find keywords that can send hundreds or even thousands of free, organic search engine visitors to your blog every day. Start using Market Samurai and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords. Avail of the free trial now! |
 |
Best post. All the tips are very useful. Thanks for posting!