Key Elements for Benchmarking Your website's SEO Performance

Many SEO projects begin with a site review or audit, identifying potential weaknesses and opportunities. However, a great number of these analyses leave out a healthy dose of collecting metrics - a critical factor in helping to benchmark future progress and see how far you've come .

Identifying the Site Development Process

Before we begin on the metrics and site analysis itself, figuring out the responsibilities and duties of the people on the web development team is an essential part of the auditing and review process for every consultant or in-house SEO seeking to implement change.

If you're a small business or an individually run site, you can skip this section. For those of you that have an internal organizational hierarchy, here's the process to follow:

Step 1: Identify the website management:

Who manages the front-end design & production?

Who handles back-end development and databases?

Who is responsible for content approval?

Step 2: Where is approval required?

Which pages need approval from who in order to make changes?

What permission is required to make sitewide changes or add new pages/navigation/content?

Step 3: Who has access to website reporting data?

What programs track visitor activity on the site?

What are the logins to the visitor tracking software?

Is log-file access or spider monitoring available?

SEO upgrades often require changes outside the scope of a typical CMS, and knowing this early on will give you the foresight required to prepare and accurately estimate the resources you'll need to allocate to the project.

Categorizing and Segmenting Your Site

In order to conduct an accurate analysis of your search engine traffic, you need to have a good idea of not only how much search traffic you're pulling in, but which sections of content are driving value. Very frequently, more link-worthy and well-linked-to content like blogs, articles and top-level pages overperform while other sections languish in obscurity. By effectively segmenting your site into similar groups you can uncover the discrepancies.

Assessing Historical Progress

As you collect metrics for the SEO process ahead, it's extremely valuable to get historical as well as current data.

Quantity of content - how many pages have existed on the site?

Search engine inclusion - what percent of these have drawn in search traffic?

Link acquisition - what has been the rate of growth for links?

Overall search traffic - how much has it gone up/down in the past?

Distribution of search traffic across engines - has Google shrunk while Yahoo! rose?

Once you have this information, you can apply it immediately by identifying spikes and drops. What were the events that preceded both positive and negative changes to the site's SEO? You'll want to repeat projects that brought value and ditch those that weren't worth the time and energy.

Leveraging Data for SEO Improvements

Once you've assembled the data you need, you're ready to begin an SEO evaluation and get to work improving your site's ability to perform in the engines. The process of data collection itself is valuable - you'll know how to assess performance for the future, but that's not the only benefit. The information you collect should allow you to be smarter about the methods you pursue for search engine optimization.

For an in-depth understanding of your website's SEO Performance, get in touch with our experts at [email protected] or call us at +91-98367-81929.  

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