Measure Your SEO Results with These Alternative Options
Plenty of webmasters tend to use just their search engine rankings alone to measure their SEO metrics. While this can give you some idea whether your SEO efforts are having the desired effect, this shouldn’t be the only metric you use to monitor effectiveness.
Here are some alternative metrics that can offer you far greater insight into your SEO results and that we at 123neonsigns found very useful to measure.
Conversions vs Rankings
Many people believe that SEO is strictly about pinpointing keywords that people use in order to locate a specific page. While this is true to some degree, if there are visitors finding the page in question who simply leave without taking any action, the SEO efforts for that keyword no longer matter.
This is where measuring the conversion optimization can be an extremely effective way to calculate whether the SEO for the keywords chosen are actually translating into conversions for optimal profits.
There are some excellent tools available that can measure conversion optimization, such as Pmetrics, that can measure various metrics that include:
- Bounce rate
- Referring sites or search engines
- Length of time a visitor spends on a page
- Frequency or uniqueness of that visitor
- Number of actions taken per visit to the page
By gauging results such as the ones noted above alongside the measurements for keyword effectiveness, it’s far easier to estimate whether total SEO efforts are achieving the desired effect.
Keyword Modifiers and Stemming
As a site is optimized for specific keywords, this in turn can assist with the optimization of other connecting pages within the site. Certain related keyword combinations can affect the ranking level of other pages that could be driving more traffic than first realized.
The key to this is keyword stemming, or looking for related keyword phrases that contain keyword modifiers. This helps search engines more closely match related searches, but also assists your own SEO efforts in the process.
An example of keyword modifiers could be those portions of phrases that are likely to correspond with what people actually search for. For instance: “How to…” is a keyword modifier that many search engine users often employ to find a specific solution to a problem.
A well-known profitable modifier is to add ‘for sale’ on the end of a keyword, as people are more likely to add this into search results when they’re ready to purchase.
Other modifiers include:
- Ways to
Alternating SEO Methods
With the recent changes to Google’s ranking algorithms, one option for insulating against these is to vary or alternate your SEO tactics. For example, begin varying the chosen anchor text for any inbound links being generated to incorporate multiple keyword variations. Then alternate this tactic by adding internal links, or deep links, to various internal pages within your site.
When you’ve created the deep links you require, use the anchor text from those internal pages to create dynamic links back to your preferred landing page.
It may be an important factor to keep the anchor text and deep links you create rooted in the same overall niche or theme, as relevance is a determining factor for results. This can mean choosing to use pages within your own site to help increase SERPs rather than focusing too strongly on generating inbound links from a site that may not have the same level of relevance.
Visitors are able to find a particular website using a vast combination of different keywords that all revolve around the same initial intention. This is most often known as latent semantic indexing, but it simply means using synonyms, jargon, abbreviations, acronyms or any other substituted terms that still mean the same thing. It’s possible to optimize complete clusters of keywords using this method, but you can increase conversions by adding more deep links from externals sites using some of these tangential keywords as anchor text.