A checklist for site owners who don’t give a damn about SEO and site stats.
You can hardly surprise anyone today talking about the importance of optimizing your sites for search engines.
To appear in Google’s top pages, you’ve got to make your website SEO-friendly: build correct site architecture, embed keywords into your content, optimize titles, tags, and meta descriptions, optimize your websites for mobiles.
Usually, website owners entrust these tasks totally to their webmasters, SEO specialists, and content writers.
This works well for large business entities, editorials of mass media, or large wholesale companies. The picture is quite different for small businesses where the bosses run everything by themselves 24-hours per day.
There is the slippery path to spend hours and hours learning every little thing in the world and become Jack-of-all-trades in a while.
So, how not get sunk in the whirl of information and data?
How to optimize your business processes, reduce costs, spare your time and efforts?
I hope these tips will help online newcomers to master their business on a professional level.
Why focus on SEO?
This is a relatively cheap method to attract audiences. It takes some resources from the beginning but will pay off lavishly in the future.
Whereas pay-per-click advertising is a short-term campaign, search engine optimization will keep your website afloat times and times more at a minimum effort. Increase your online visibility, find your niche, build up your brand reputation - you can do all this alongside your SEO tasks fulfilled smartly.
Optimized websites have all chances for ranking in Google’s top. Ensure there are no broken links or broken resources, internal links are correct and beware of spammy links to manipulate Pagerank.
On top of these SEO factors it's mandatory for your website to offer a great experience for the visitors. It should load fast, have accessibility features, clear CTAs and navigation bars, etc. Besides that is absolutely mandatory to be responsive and look great on all kind of devices like mobile phones, desktop computers and even smart TVs.
If your website is built on WordPress I suggest you getting in touch with a WordPress support company that will audit and most importantly will fix all these issues ensuring your website is top notch.
You will soon feel the lasting effect of the SEO as compared to timely PPC campaigns.
What are SEO data important for business owners?
This is a big mistake that site owners ignore Google website analytics and walk in the dark trying to build their content by intuition.
Actually, SEO involves pretty many aspects, but to measure its effectiveness, you should consider these main figures in your Google analytics report:
1. Organic search traffic
Just general figures to know your website’s success and separate pages’ success. The more, the better. However, you should think of quality over quantity. You should be aware that black-hat SEO might bring you profit over some span of time, but finally, your SEO will end up in tears and no money.
2. Unique visitors
You should know your users’ retention rate, guess their intent, and find out where you can meet their expectations.
3. Sessions (daily, monthly) and session duration
Know your audience behavior: how many people return to see your pages, how often they do it, how long it takes them to read your pages on average.
4. Click-through-rate (CTR)
This figure directly measures your SEO KPI, showing how many people click on your website when they see your website in search engine result pages (SERPs).
You compete with thousands of different sites on similar topics, and SEO should help you reach your target audience. The higher your CTR, the better your site breaks the message.
5. Audience breakdown
You’ve got to study your audience to know better their needs and values. See how many people view your site from mobiles or desktop, their age, gender, and interests.
This analysis will help you in two ways: first, to adapt content to serve better their intent, and second, to develop your business in such a way that you can engage larger audiences, make it fit a broader circle of interests.
6. Domain authority
This is very small from the start and very high when your website grows reputation. It’s great when you have links from authoritative resources quoting you, it’s cool when you appear on top pages in SERPs, and it’s superb when people get stuck on your website for many minutes and perform conversions.
7. Social value
This is extremely important in the era of social media, which brings tons of advantages over mass media, broadcast media, word-of-mouth media, and the rest.
Run social media profiles to talk to your audience, analyze social buzz to know the tendencies, and build your brand reputation in between.
What will SEO tools bring you this data?
Google prevails in the search engines market, although nothing prevents you from adding more traffic counters to your website. Google Analytics is a must-have and a great tool that will lead you to hundreds of ideas for improving your site.
Whether you get your Google statistic from an SEO consultant or do your site audit by yourself, you should operate with these figures like Ronaldo with a ball.
Check out the Audience, their Behavior Goals Conversions to see how well your articles perform.
In addition, you can deploy some SEO optimization software like Website Auditor in this example. It is a real helping hand for website optimizers. It allows integrating your Google Analytics and Google Search Console to gather all these factual data quickly.
It will also detect all kinds of possible errors and give clues on how to fix them. Every error is provided with an explanation of why it is important to get rid of it.
So, the talk of SEO-optimizers with site owners will be brief and easy: just hand in the report, summarizing what needs to be fixed. Draw attention to successes and failures, and provide a concise reference if the point is vague.
The real beauty of this SEO reporting tool is that you can automate the workflow and schedule report delivery with all the necessary figures. Get reports weekly or monthly to your email, without the need to jump into your Analytics data, and monitor your website performance even when you are away from your desktop.
How can I use this site analytics?
The online performance analysis fine-tunes your business processes and guides your site growth.
- You optimize your website by investing in the resources that only you own and will pay off in the long run. It helps build your relations with your audiences and create your brand name.
- Your site becomes a visiting card, a shop window, or a feedback medium, and all these purposes should be served at their best.
- You can do some competitor research further and know where you stand in your niche, what steps you need to take to keep up with your competitors, to outrank them, or maybe to borrow some techniques that they use. You might enjoy some keyword rank checker tools here like Rank Tracker.
Create an advertising media kit
Where do all these Google statistics lead?
Once your website does not look like a neglected kid, it starts being a tempting piece for all kinds of media, advertisers, and business partners, depending on the niche where you work. Somebody will be happy to sell with you, others will want to get a quote or a mention, or whatever.
When you have all these wonderful data, it’s a sin not to use them to announce you are great. Create an attractive digital advertising media kit.
This is exactly where you state that your website has an established, lasting audience and is open for business partnership. If your website is available in multiple languages or countries make sure you add these details in the digital advertising media kit.
Your media kit has to be explicit, enticing, and prove that you are a reliable partner.
Now it’s over to you!
I hope this little list has made the whole picture about SEO simple and clear.
Take decisions confidently, and make your site work for you like a clock.
