Five Factors that Determine SEO Success
Many Internet professionals consider keyword ranking as the means to measure the success of their optimization campaign. This is quite true if landing at the top of the search results page is the ultimate purpose of optimizing web content.
Nowadays, SEO success is measured in ways that go beyond keyword ranking. Search engine optimization is designed for search engines to guide humans to the content that can help them find the information they want.
The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is sales. It does its job by driving traffic to a website and turn site visitors into paying customers. Obtaining a high keyword ranking is just a part of the entire process. Every enterprise needs to go further than this to ensure the effectiveness of its SEO campaigns.
Here are five factors that help to determine SEO success:
1. Organic traffic from major search engines
The primary function of SEO is to give your website a high page rank in the search results. This will help to drive traffic into your website. High volume of traffic is one of the factors that can help to determine SEO success. Keyword ranking is only a means to attain it.
2. Conversions
Conversion is a positive action that your reader takes as a response to your call. It can be a purchase, a subscription, a download or a form completion. You can measure conversions by setting up conversion funnels in Google Analytics.
3. Bounce Rate
In Internet terminology, bounce rate refers to the percentage of site visitors who chose to exit from your website and enter a different site rather than proceed to other pages after their initial visit. “Bounces” are common on the web and it’s difficult to maintain a bounce rate of less than 20 percent. A website gets a bounce rate of 100 percent if a visitor enters a page and exits that site from the same page without proceeding to other pages.
A low bounce rate can also be used as one of the yardsticks to determine SEO success.
4. Average time spent on site
The time spent by people on a website is an indication that its content is helpful or interesting. Content-driven websites don’t use sales or conversions to measure the effectiveness of its optimization strategy. The average time spent by web surfers on these sites can be used as metrics to gauge its SEO.
5. Keyword Yield
Keyword yield is best described as the average number of keywords in a page that drives traffic in a given month. This means that if the average number of traffic-generating keywords per page per month is high, your site is well-optimized..
These are the five factors that help to determine SEO success. You can use these as your metrics to ensure that your SEO is taking your content to the right direction.