Essential SEO Stats to Monitor Website Performance

There are all sorts of ways you can analyse your website, and the one you probably hear about most is SEO (search engine optimisation). Good SEO is the backbone of any website and should be considered a key priority along with great design and content.

Site optimisation is nothing new – the original web masters were doing it long before Google arrived – but today you must be actively involved in SEO in order to ensure your online presence is doing all it can to support your business.

The problem is that there are all sorts of SEO stats you can analyse when looking at your website performance and knowing which ones to focus on, and how to improve, takes knowledge, time and money.

To get you started we outline some of the essential data for monitoring the performance of your web pages. Begin by looking at and getting to grips with these and you will soon understand how your SEOstrategy can be improved.

• Traffic sources

  Visitors to your website can get there from all sorts of places. Previous customers or those who know of you company may come straight to you by typing your URL in the address bar of their browser. Many will come via a search engine, having entered a query for a keyword that is relevant to your site. Others will click a link to one of your pages, possibly from an online news article, blog or social media post. Knowing how people come to your site is important as it shows you where your efforts are working, what you can drop and areas where you might want to do more.

• Conversion rate

  At the other end of the process, the conversion rate tells you how many of your total visitors went on to make a purchase, sign up to a newsletter or carry out some other desired action. If you have a low conversion rate there will be many things you can do to improve it.

• Visitor location/visit method

  Knowing the physical location of your visitors and on what kind of device they access your site are important for updating your keyword targets and enhancing your site for different browsers and screen sizes. Both of these things help you to create a site that is useful and user-friendly.

• Site interaction/bounce rate

  As users move through the pages on your site you can see the route they take and assess where you lose them. A high bounce rate can indicate that your pages are not attractive/informative/engaging enough, or show that your navigation system frustrates visitors. Looking at this data will help you to create a site that is easy to navigate and gets people to the information they need quickly and effectively.

Whichever SEO tool you use you will be presented with all kinds of data, and if this is daunting then start by looking at only one or two pieces of information, learn from them and then move on to the next ones