Texas SEO Company Blog

SEO, or search engine optimization, is nothing if you are tracking your results. Yes, you can rank you pages highly. So what? If you don’t know what is happening with your site beyond the high rankings then what difference does it make? Do you want bragging rights or an income?

It is important to invest in an analytics package, even if you choose a free one like Google Analytics. But knowing the results of your SEO efforts is an absolute must.

Important statistics that you need to pay attention to for your Texas-based website are:

• Visitors to your website
• Unique visitors vs. repeat visitors
• Most trafficked pages on your site
• Bounce rate
• Time spent on your site
• Keywords used to find your site
• Top entrance pages
• Top exit pages
• Most clicked on links on your website
• Traffic sources

When you use an analytics package to analyze your most important content, you’ll know a lot more about your site and what makes it successful or fall on its face. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know what it is. And you can’t repeat a success if you don’t know what created it. An analytics package can help you identify your SEO strengths and weaknesses.

Do you know what measures SEO success for your Texas-based website? Most businesses these days focus on PageRank, but PageRank is one of the poorest measures of success. A recent article at seoptimise lists 33 website metrics that are much better for measuring success. Here’s a short summary of those metrics and the ones that I think you should focus on for your Texas business:

• ROI - Online or off line, how much you spend versus how much you make is a very important metric.
• Sales - Does your website close sales? Is it supposed to?
• Lead generation - Some websites are simply meant to be lead generators. Some do both lead generation and close sales. Know what you expect from your Texas-based website and measure it carefully.
• Conversions - A conversion is any action you want your visitor to take. It could be a purchase, opt-in to your newsletter, or download a free media kit. Whatever action you want the visitor to take should be defined and measured.
• Subscribers - Whether we’re talking about newsletter subscriptions, RSS feed subscriptions, or another subscription-based action you want your visitors to take, this is one important metric you should measure if you want your Texas-based website to succeed.
• Visitors - How many visitors come to your Texas-based website every day? Every month? Every year? You should know this.
• Returning visitors - Even more important than total visitor count is returning visitors. How many of your visitors come back?
• Page Views - How many pages on your Texas-based website does the average visitor see?
• Time on page/site - How much time does the average visitor spend on each page and on your website?
• Bounce rate - Bounce rate refers to the number of site visitors who leave without looking at a second page or who leave in under 1 minute. Blogs usually have high bounce rates because people tend to read one post then move on. Static websites, however, should not have high bounce rates.
• Abandonment - Do you have a form or shopping cart and you want to know how many people leave in the middle before completing a transaction? This is an important metric because it could tell you that you need to make changes to the process.
• Traffic sources - Where does your traffic come from? Google? Yahoo!? Social media sites? Referrals from other sites? This is important information because it could be a clue as to how well you are doing optimizing your website or it could tell you where you need to focus your advertising dollars.
• Geographic location of visitors - If your business caters to Texans and you are getting a high number of visitors from China and a low number of visitors from Texas then something is wrong. How do you fix it?
• Backlinks - How many inbound links does your website have?
• Quality of backlinks - Are those backlinks from sites that are related to your niche? Are they from link farms or bad neighborhoods?
• Search engine saturation - How many web pages do you have indexed at each of the search engines? The more the merrier.
• Technorati Authority - This is important for blogs. A high authority number at Technorati means you’ve had a lot of other bloggers link to you in the past six months.
• Social media votes - Pick any social media site and if you get a lot of votes there for material on your website - whether you submitted it or someone else did - then you know you have quality content.

That’s only 18 metrics. Out of 33. The others mentioned by seoptimise are somewhat important and many may be important for some websites but not for all. The above 18 metrics are metrics that I would consider important for any website. If you want to improve your Texas-based website then you should focus on measuring these basic metrics.