Measuring their SEO effectiveness is one of the most important tasks in the to-do list of site owners. All site owners do it; in fact, it is almost impossible for them to resist typing keywords into searching engines to analyze their search results. However, many fail to realize that this exercise barely matters, as it provides minimal insight regarding the actual rankings for their targeted keywords. In fact, measuring their SEO effectiveness should be based on the following three factors ONLY:

• Keyword rankings

• Monthly visitors

• Tracking leads and conversion rates

Keyword Rankings: It is one of the most critical aspects of search engine optimization. As a part of your SEO strategy, you will be targeting a few keywords relevant to your niche. Make sure your landing pages are indexed and ranked for the targeted keywords. Also, ensure your site is optimized for both short and long tail keywords. In fact, a website ranking for a few long tail keywords in the very first month means the SEO professionals are doing their job. Another indication that will help to understand the effectiveness of your SEO efforts is the website’s keyword rankings positions. If you are doing it right, the keyword ranking positions should improve month over month. So start generating your keyword ranking reports and monitor the process closely to ensure your SEO team is doing the right job.

Monthly visitors: Analyzing your monthly visitors will help you to measure your website’s performance over time. In addition, it will help you to understand the current trends, which in turns, allows you to determine whether a particular effort is contributing to your SEO goals. It will also allow you to see the bounce rates and the time  a visitor spent in a particular page. Google Analytics is one of the best tools, when it comes to analyze your web traffic. Better yet, it’s free! This tool is simple to install and activate.

It generally takes two months’ time to start receiving traffic from search engines. However, you should expect a gradual increase in your site’s traffic month over month, provided your SEO efforts are in place. Also, consider that it is unlikely to have increased traffic every month; nevertheless, it should not fall.

One of the best ways to ensure improved traffic is to add new content pages on a regular basis. Also, don’t forget your social networking, as both Google and people take social mentions seriously.

Tracking leads and conversion rates: They are the bottom-line, right! All your SEO efforts become meaningless if they fail to generate leads. After all what’s the use of a website that enjoys a good number of visitors but has zero conversion rate. In fact, the leads and conversions are the two most important factors to measure your ROI.

More than your marketing efforts, lead generation is dependent on the effectiveness of your website. Thus, make sure you have placed your email address, phone number, and inquiry box on the “Contact Us” page, if you are selling services. For ecommerce sites or websites selling products, ensure your online payment facility is working fine so that the visitors can make the transaction with ease. In fact, all your “Call-to-Action” links are opening properly.

Comparing month over month lead generation and conversion stats will help you to calculate ROI.

No offense, but expecting immediate ROI through the SEO efforts will only prove one’s imprudence. Following proper SEO strategies rather delivers good results in longer run. And by “proper SEO strategies”, I mean the ethical SEO practices.

Also, consider that measuring your SEO efforts is not always expensive. Though paid services provide detailed reports on SEO efforts, some free online tools are good enough for analyzing your website’s performance. We have already mentioned Google Analytics that help you to analyze your visitor’s behaviors and attitude, while giving a detailed report about how the website is performing. In addition, you can use the following free tools to analyze your SEO efforts.

Woorank – It is one of the best tools ideal for basic SEO analysis. This free tool offers a clean interface and has no ads to annoy the users. It covers various aspects of your SEO efforts including visitor’s information, SEO suggestions; SEO tags data, SEO tech info, keyword analysis, social share data, tracking & technologies, link evaluation, website authority & back links, and usability & security.

Marketing Grader by HubsSpot – This free toll gives in-depth analysis of your website. It can even differentiate a blog from a website. Some of its major features include SEO Info, blogging analysis, social stats, mobile compatibility check, and analytics.

Site Trail – It’s a rather new tool for SEO analyzing. The features of Site Trail are similar to Woorank. However, they have extended their services to Hosting, DNS Records, Server, and HTTP headers information. Other features are basic SEO data, social media stats, traffic rank details, visitor analysis, and content & linking analysis.

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