How to measure real results from your website

Measurement is vital for SEO and improving your website.

To see if your website is achieving it’s goals, you need to be constantly reviewing and measuring results. To have effective results, you’re going to need to measure multiple metrics.

What are metrics? Metrics, sometimes referred to as key performance indicators (KPIs), are the hard numbers obtained from your website data.

When looking at what tools you should use to audit your marketing campaigns, there are a few options:

• Google Analytics: this is a free tool that every business should utilise. It will provide all the information you need to improve your website. You can find out how specific aspects of content are performing, as well as just the overall marketing efforts. You can create your own customised dashboard to see metrics relevant to you. Google Analytics will also allow you to download reports to give you a snapshot of the information you need.

• HubSpot: every month, HubSpot will deliver a powerpoint presentation with information and comparison data.
• Kissmetrics: this will provide visualisation tools on how users interact with a business’ website, app or mobile product.

If you’re just a startup, then you might not be sure how to measure solid metrics. What results do you even need to be looking for? You have to look deeper than just number of views and leads generated. Where do you start?

Here are some of the metrics you should be measuring:

Conversion Metrics

If you’re like majority of businesses, one of your goals will be to get visitors to take an action. Forms of action include sales, completing a form, a phone call, downloading a PDF, signing up to a service or making an appointment.

Whatever your call to action is, you’ll want to make sure it’s working. Using Google Analytics, you can set up Goal Conversion tracking. This will allow you to review how visitors are interacting with your website.

Engagement Metrics

This is great for when you need data that is a bit more thorough than simply how many people visit your website. Engagement metrics will show you:

• How long people spent on your website
• How many pages they visited
• Bounce rate - how many visitors entered the site then left rather than continuing to view other pages. This is important as you can then alter your webpage or campaign strategy to ensure visitors stay on your website for a longer period of time and ultimately complete a call to action. It’s a good indication of pogo sticking, when a user continually goes back and forth between search results because they can’t find what they’re looking for.
• Social media shares or mentions.

Keyword rankings

This is a good way to know where your traffic is coming from. Keyword rankings will measure specific terms you’re trying to rank for. To achieve a better ranking, you’ll be using relevant keywords. These are ones that users search for the most, and will help your website appear on the first page of Google’s search results. Your website's results will show you what are the strong keywords and what aren’t helping your ranking.
There are numerous tools which will enable you to check your keyword ranking. Some worth checking out are:

• SEMrush: type in your URL and see what keywords you are currently ranking for. It also allows you to check keyword competition and the position of keywords in search engines.
• Ahrefs: automatically detects what keywords your website is ranking for.
• Serpfox

Backlinks

Backlinks aren’t the be all and end all of SEO anymore, but they’re still pretty important. Your SEO plan should therefore include the acquisition of backlinks. Not getting any will definitely hold back your growth. There are a few metrics to look at when considering your backlink analysis. This includes:

• Link Distribution Ratio: this is the ratio of total backlinks pointing towards the homepage to the total backlinks pointing towards the rest of the site. If the ratio is balanced, it means more links are pointing to supporting content. It is also a reflection of engaging content within a website.
• Total Unique Linking Domains: this is looking at the number of links from unique domains. If you have 100 links, but 30 of those are from the one domain, then you have 70 unique domains linking to your website.
• Trust Flow: a trademark of Majestic, trust flow is a score based on quality on a scale of 0-100. Majestic “collated many trusted seed sites based on a manual review of the web.” So if you’ve got a higher score, you’re more closely linked to a trusted seed site. A lower ranking means there might be some questionable links.

A few websites to use to track your backlinks include:

• Ahrefs
• Majestic
• Searchmetrics

Page load speed

Users will generally leave your website if it has poor, irrelevant content, or if it just takes too long to load. Nobody wants to be sitting at their computer staring at a blank screen waiting for a website to load. If your website is too slow, it will result in a high bounce rate, and lower your Google ranking.

There are a few things that will slow down your website. This includes using too many or malicious plugins and having too many images.

There are easy ways to check your website's loading speed, including checking out:

• Quick Sprout
• GTmetrix
• Pingdom

These are just some of the metrics you should be frequently measuring to ensure you’ve got an effective website and can achieve the best SEO.