With over a billion searches every day in search engines, it’s hard to underestimate the importance of having your business present on page one (ideally in positions 1 – 3) ranking for the keywords that impact your sales and conversions.
"In 2019, Google received nearly 2.3 trillion searches and on page one alone, the first five organic results accounted for 67.60% of all the clicks."
So how is your business performing when it comes to ranking in the crucial top three spots of search for your most important keywords?
Accurately measuring the success of your content
Once you’ve done your keyword research, created compelling content, optimised it to be search-friendly, and hit ‘publish’, you then need to accurately measure the success of your efforts.
4 tips for measuring the success of your SEO content
1. Create a custom segment for "Visitors from Search Engines only"
By creating this custom segment, you’ll be able to analyse the behavioural patterns of the visitors who found your website through a search engine.
This way you can use many of Matomo’s powerful features (Visitors, Behaviour, Acquisition, Ecommerce, Goals etc.) focused entirely on search engine visitors only.
Once you’ve created this segment, you can begin to see key metrics like which entry pages are responsible for referring visitors to your website. For example: Visit Behaviour – Entry Pages, this is a great way to analyse your most effective SEO pages.You may be surprised at what pages currently bring in the most traffic.
As well as discovering which content resonates with your search audience, you will also be able to create more content focused on your targeted audience. Do this by learning which locations your search visitors are from, which device they use, what time of the day they visited your website and much more.
2. Website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate.
“The top four ranking factors are website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate.”
These four metrics set the benchmark for your SEO success.
First, you need to get as many of the ‘right’ users to see your content. If you feel you’ve exhausted channels such as social media, email and possibly paid posts; think about who your ideal audience is. Where are they likely to hang out online? Are there community groups or forum sites that are interested in what you’re writing about?
Whatever the case, putting yourself out there and getting more traffic to your website will help show search engines that people are interested in your website. As a result, they’ll likely rank you higher for that.
When we say getting more of the ‘right’ users, we mean users who are generally interested in the topic/subject you’re writing about and interested in the work you do.
This is important for the next three metrics – increasing users time on your website, increasing the amount of pages your users explore on your website, and reducing the overall bounce rate for users who leave your website in a matter of seconds.
To evaluate these metrics, go to Behaviour – Pages in your Matomo and see how these metrics vary on previous posts or pages you’ve created. Which pages are already showing you the best results? Why do they get the results? Can you focus on creating more content like this?
Understanding what content is resonating with your users through these metrics is easy and is the starting point for measuring the success of your SEO content strategy.
3. Row Evolution
The Row Evolution feature embedded within the Search Engine Keywords Performance plugin lets you see how your ranking positions have changed over time for your important keywords. It also lets you see how the incoming traffic, related to your keywords, has changed over time.
This is valuable when measuring the changes you’ve made to your landing pages to see if it has a positive or negative effect on your ranking efforts.
This also lets you see how search engine algorithm changes affect your search rankings over time, and to see if the effects of these algorithm updates are temporary or long lasting.
Row evolution allows you to report on keyword performance with ease. If you only check your insights once a week or once a fortnight, you’ll see how ranking positions for your important keywords have changed daily (or even weekly, monthly or yearly however you prefer.)
4. What results are you getting from the lesser known search engines?
"In 2019 (to date), Google accounted for just over 75% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 9.97%, Baidu at 9.34%, and Yahoo at 2.77%."
For most of us, we want to be ranking in the top three spots in Google Search because that’s where the majority of search users are. However, don’t shy away from opportunities you could be missing with lesser known search engines.
If you sell a product aimed at 55-65 year olds who use a PC computer, chances are they are using Bing. If you have customers in China the majority will be using Baidu, or in our case at Matomo, many of our loyal users use a privacy-friendly search engine like DuckDuckGo or Qwant.
Some of your ideal customers might be finding you through these alternative search engines, so be sure to measure the impact that these referrals may have on your conversions.
Strategically including important keywords that impact your business
While search is an important acquisition channel for most businesses, it’s also one of the most competitive.
We recommend analysing your keyword and content performance regularly and alter content that isn’t performing as well as you’d like. You need to continually learn from the content that is successful, and focus on creating more content like this.
The final thing to remember with search keyword performance is to be patient. If you have had little success in the past with attracting customers through search, it can take time to build this reputation with search engines.
