Measuring Your Status: Extreme SEO Makeover
As I mentioned previously, I’m transforming my recent “Extreme SEO Makeover” seminar into blog form. Last week we made an exhaustive keyword list, and earlier this week we transformed that list into an actionable Tier 1 keyword list. Now we’re going to make sure we understand where we are currently by measuring our status.
Before we can get to where we want to be, we first need to find out where we are. (There’s a leadership lesson in there someplace, but I haven’t yet had enough coffee to find out where.) Anyway, this mostly means two areas of measurement – site activity and search rankings.
Measuring Site Activity
There are a number of free and paid analytics programs, but as many use Google Analytics we’ll focus on that one. First of all, you absolutely must have some kind of analytics program installed, so you can measure important metrics like total number of visitors, search volume by search engine, and referring websites. Also, seeing how volumes increase (hopefully) for keywords you’ve targeted will give you valuable feedback about what you’re doing.
OK, so you have analytics in place… What now? Take an afternoon and poke around your data, and see if you can figure out answers to some of these questions. It’ll probably be easier to select several months and look at the data by week instead of by day, to smooth out the daily cycles.
- What percentage of visits come from search engines? from referrals?
- How is general visitorship trending – up, down, or flat?
- Are variations of your company name your most popular keywords? (For under-optimized sites, this tends to be the case)
- Which pages are most popular?
- If you’re using PPC campaigns, what’s the trend on unpaid visits- up, down, or flat?
There are many other questions, but basically the idea is to get a good look at how things have been going. This will give you ideas about where to focus your offpage SEO efforts once the site is optimized.
Measuring Search Ranking
Clearly, if your aim is to improve your search rankings for individual keywords you first need to know how you rank for them before you do anything. The hard way to do this is to enter your keywords one at a time into each of the search engines you want to track, then scroll through the results until you find your site. #FAIL
Luckily, there are tools out there that can speed this process greatly. Generally, they allow you to create a tracking file complete with your URL and keyword list, and with a click they’ll query the search engines and find out your latest ranking results. Some tools will also give you a graph of the results so you can track trends over time. (If your tool doesn’t do this, you might want to create yourself a spreadsheet to do that.)
I’m not going to recommend any particular tool for this, since all the ones I’ve seen pretty much get the job done and none stands out enough to warrant a link here(!).
Don’t be too concerned with the results here, you’ll probably see very few ranking keywords. That’s good, in some ways, because you have lots of room for improvement!
(BTW, have you noticed that we still haven’t done any work on the site? Patience…)
Extreme SEO Makeover blog series
- Seminar Feedback
- Introduction to Extreme SEO Makeover
- Identify your Keywords
- Keyword Research
- Measuring your Status
- Aligning Keywords and Pages
- Optimizing Pages
- Trust but Verify
- Conclusions
