As an online business owner with goals to succeed, about the term SEO seems familiar to you, right? SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, is known as an attempt to optimise a website in search engines in order to generate more traffic to the website, as well as get more potential customers. No wonder many business owners would like to implement SEO for sake of the growth of their business by making their websites more visible in search engines. Therefore, in order to optimise their websites with SEO, a business owner usually hires an SEO engineer or they just sign with an SEO service company.
However, the question is how far you can trust your SEO Company? Are they really good just like they claim they are? In order to help you find out more about your SEO company, we have 5 metrics that you can use to measure if your SEO is working or not. If you are a business owner who is looking for the right SEO company or is already working together with an SEO company, these tips are just for you!
- Look at the Keyword Rankings
One of the classic ways to track your SEO efforts is by seeing how your keyword rankings are performing. In order to see how your keyword is performing, you need to ask your SEO agency to track and report your site performance regularly. Then, look for the keywords that have relevancy, traffic, commercial intent, and adequate competition.
After all, getting the #1 rank is not the most important thing, since your bottom line is what matters the most. In fact, getting ranked #1 for a bunch of keywords, yet getting low volume, low converting, low competition, and low buying intent does nothing to help your business at the end of the day. Therefore, an SEO agency that keeps telling you about how they can make your company get the #1 rank is actually questionable.
- Does Your SEO Agency Use Website Citation?
If you thought that Phonebooks were dead, you might be wrong, since they’ve actually evolved into worldwide online directories such as Yelp and Foursquare. In these directories, you can refer to any place online where your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are listed as a citation. This makes creating citations be a strong SEO strategy for local businesses, since it provides a strong signal to search engines about your business details, as well as to show that you have a strong presence in your locality. In fact, low quality citation websites can damage your SEO strength. This is because search engine may easily consider them as spam and reduce your SEO strength if they link to your website. Of course, SEO agencies will take advantages of these opportunities while fully understanding on how to avoid risk.
- Look at the Organic Search Traffic
In order to make someone click on your link, you can simply come up as good resource for that topic. There are at least three ways to increase your organic traffic. First, is through improved rankings, as more people will see your sites. Second, is by improving titles and Meta descriptions, which are the bits of information displayed in search results, then make it more targeted. The last one is to create more content to target new keywords and opportunity.
In order to see how good your organic search traffic is, you may need to compare the performance year over year. You can also use and compare previous month’s data, research search trends using Google Trends and factor in fluctuation.
- Observe the Online Conversion Rate
Many people say that healthy online conversion rates vary widely across industries. In other words, it depends on how you define a conversion, including selling products or contacting form submissions or downloading a whitepaper. Above all, the important point is conversions should be measurable, so that it can be tied to revenue.
In general, conversion rate is known as the percentage of website visitors that complete a conversion (or goal). You can read the percentage below as a general breakdown; that will look like this:
3.5% and above: Excellent!
1%-3% : Good
0%-1% : it’s time to get help from a professional.
With SEO, you can drive organic traffic, while optimising your website to convert these visitors into qualified leads.
- Writing not for People, but for the Sake of Writing for Search Engines
If you are not sure whether your SEO agency has provided you with the right services or not, you can also take a look at the content. After reading the content, you can analyse it with some questions, such as, does your content give you opportunity to shine and build trust with your readers? Does it give something valuable? Of course, you still need to follow the requirement of search engines, since it might give you credit for some well optimised content. After all building the trust with a potential customer is more valuable than the returns you’ll get on search engines.
Hopefully, after reading the 5 tips above, you can decide whether your SEO company is helping or just making you spend much money uselessly. In fact, by knowing the tips earlier, you can also do some preventive acts before choosing an SEO agency to work with.