Anything that is quantifiable can be improved and measured more effectively through standardized parameters if SEO specialists are to be believed. For a start, any search engine marketing or optimizing campaign that you launch takes anything from 8 weeks to six months to show the desired results. If your campaign failed to deliver the goods even after patiently waiting for some months, it could be that the strategy was devised after evaluating the website rank based on a couple of metrics (standards of measurement or assessment).
If your focus of perusal is limited to a few metrics, then it goes without saying that you’ll be missing out on getting your site evaluated through yardsticks by which the portal could be performing well or could be doing worse. There are various metrics you can fall back upon depending upon the product or service you’re involved with as well as the nature of your campaign. If you wish to stay ahead of the competition, then you’d have to consider appraising your site based on some standardized metrics. Following are some metrics that you can consider and then carefully select the ones that you’d prefer to integrate with your SEO strategy.
Mechanized traffic monitoring
The major search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo strongly believes that smartphone owners are going to form the major chunk (amongst users of different types of digital gadgets) of online traffic (which includes users surfing the net on all the popular digital devices). Google, the most extensively used search engine had the sagacity to realize the above assertion or generalization. Consequently, it went on an overdrive in order to identify some technical barriers that were preventing sites from loading and interfacing on smartphones in a manner that the user found user-friendly.
Following the identification drive, Google restructured their algorithms accordingly where it became imperative for a website to load speedily on a mobile phone if the same were to be accorded a good rank. The aspect of user-friendliness of the site was also a significant prerequisite for achieving a high rank on SERPs.
So, it won’t be out of place to suggest that you’d have to optimize your site keeping smartphones users in mind. In fact, the convenience of these users should be your primary concern where the need of adhering to search engine ranking parameters takes a backseat compared to the former requirement. Check out Google Analytics for evaluating the accessibility of your site (using the mobile-oriented analytics) on smartphones vis-à-vis the usability of desktops and laptops. Chances are that you’ll be able to figure out some glaring incompatibilities which you’d have to redress without delay.
Observe the manner in which Google uses web crawlers on your site
Google uses a variety of web crawlers (‘Googlebots’ being the most numerous amongst these) for supervising the way it scans your site. For checking out how the search engine does so, you have to click on Google Search Console and study the statistical crawl reports pertaining to ‘total pages crawled every day’; ‘kilobytes downloaded each day, and the ‘time it takes to download a single page’. Any or all discrepancies can be corrected by making your site more effective with respect to attracting greater traffic based on link-building.
Review the efficacy of your campaign by the proportion of returning visitors
Side by side with attracting first-time visitors, it is crucial that your site is able to lure the recurring visitors. If your portal is effective in doing both, then it is evident that its graphics are advanced as well as the SEO content is being updated periodically. You can view the percentages of both returning and new visitors on Google Analytics (click on Overview under Audiences tab).
You can also improve the on-page optimization of your site by measuring the ultimate action of users after they surf through your site, and use time-on-page metrics to find out whether the audience is spending time on your site.
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