All the inexperienced SEO users are in luck. The internet is filled with some very useful tips and tricks on how to make your strategy better. From the basic guides to the expert methods, you can pick information that will help you do the necessary tweaks to your website and make it more visible and popular. However, amateurs often find it hard to check if the optimization methods they use actually work. That’s why we created this guide. If you want to know if your SEO is effective, make sure you read the following text. Here are the main points to check to get an idea of how well your website is doing and track its success.
Check your website’s health using Ahrefs
Ahrefs tool is widely used in the SEO world, and there’s a good reason for it. It’s one of the main tools that can help you check your website’s health, analyze keyword rankings, etc. When clicking Site Audit, you can get results about the health of your SEO, as well as the most important warnings and errors you should take a look at. How to know if your SEO is effective?
Well, the score on Ahrefs should be above 75 percent, with most of its parts doing properly. If the results are below this number, there are probably some links not working properly, or some other problem on the website you should check out. And if you’re not sure how to build links properly, it’s always best to hire a professional such as Link Department to help you out.
Keywords
Organic keywords are also one of the ways to check if your SEO strategy is doing a good job. They represent the number of keywords that are relevant for the website ranking and belong to the top 100 organic searches. As it takes time to see the increase in traffic, you can start with checking the increase of the organic keywords. Again, Ahrefs can help you out with this one – check Site Explorer, and click Organic Search. This will lead you to the trends of organic keywords in your content, and check if the numbers are growing or not. More organic keywords mean the online presence is increasing, too, and there are more and more key phrases that direct traffic to the website.
Traffic
As we mentioned, the common time when you can actually see some growth in traffic is after 4 months or more. If there have been a few months since you started a certain strategy, check your traffic trends and see if there are any results. Use Google Analytics or some other SEO Tools to help you out. And if you’re not satisfied with the results, see what are some other ways to help you increase traffic to your website with success.
The quality of your content
It’s widely known that the content you provide on your website should be something your visitors need. It should provide them with answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Also, give additional information on the topic they’re interested in. Check if the content you have on your website meets these criteria, and also the needs of potential customers. If not, see what you can do better – high-quality articles, guides, additional multimedia, etc.
Meta descriptions and page titles
Both meta description and page title should ‘lure’ a searcher to open the page. They should accurately tell what the page is about and also be written in a way that’s interesting for the visitors. Use Google Search Console to find out the CTRs (click-through rates), as they are also affecting the ranking of the website. These seemingly unimportant factors can actually make a huge difference to your SEO strategy.
What happens after people reach your website?
The success of your SEO doesn’t end once a searcher reaches your website. It’s very important what happens after that moment. Engagement is also one of the ways to see if your SEO is effective. Things you should look for are:
- time spent on a page – if your website contains some long blog posts, and the time spent on those pages is quite short, something is wrong with it. Surely, some pages of your website will have low time results, such as the Contact Us page. However, if the same happens with blog posts, there’s something you should change about writing your content.
- Conversion rates – as you can apply these rates on everything, make sure you check them so you can improve the ROI.
- scroll depth – how ‘deep’ a searcher got in a page shows if they are actually reading your content. If the scroll depth is not high, maybe you should revise your content, and improve its quality.
- the number of bounce rates – times when a searcher visited a page on your website and left. No additional pages they visited. Even though this isn’t the most important factor, there are certain businesses that should do more to avoid these sessions.
All of these factors can show you how visitors spend time on your website. These metrics are a great way to see if your SEO is effective, and visitors get what they needed when made the search.
Check regularly if your SEO is effective
Great website optimization takes time, and it depends on a number of factors. It’s important to regularly check if your SEO is effective, so you don’t waste time or money on ineffective methods. Even when an SEO strategy is efficient, you shouldn’t forget about it. Constant maintenance and tailoring to your customers’ needs and other trends are necessary to always provide excellent results.