Another week, another installment in our SEO FAQ series. If you’ve been following our recent postings, you would have acquired an actionable understanding of on-site SEO practices that you can use to optimize your online store’s ranking in Google’s search engine results. The content we’ve shared is distilled from the expertise and first-hand experience of our community members, which you can find in SHOPLAZZA Community.
Once you’ve tested out SEO practices by doing keyword research, URL optimization, content marketing, review marketing, and blogging, among other things, the next logical step in your SEO journey would be to measure the results of all your hard work. Granted, it could take at least 6 months - 12 months for your online store’s search engine rankings to change dramatically, especially if you’re working in a highly competitive niche, but you still need to track your results to figure out how you can better further optimize your online presence.
That’s why we’ll be looking at SEO metrics in the penultimate installment of our SEO FAQ series today. Check out these 5 FAQs below to figure out how to measure your results!
Q: Which SEO metrics should I measure?
A: Your Google ranking should be measured through the perspective of Google Analytics. This means that you should be measuring things like Google search rankings, domain authority & links, social media & reviews, traffic sources, and user behavior.
Q: What are SERP ranks?
A: Google search rankings are often referred to as Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank. You can measure your rank manually or with tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and MOZ. The preceding tools will automatically determine your objective SERP rank for whatever keyword you decide to plug in, by eliminating the bias of search engine personalization; this is the most accurate and effective way of tracking your SEO results. If you decide to figure out your SERP rank manually, be sure to browse on Google Chrome using “incognito mode”. Alternatively, you can also sign into your Google account, go to “Preferences”, and select “Do not use private results”. This way, you won’t be seeing your own website at the top of historical searches.
Q: What’s Domain Authority?
A: Domain authority is essentially a reflection of the importance of your website on the internet, from Google’s perspective. Absolute domain authority is not as important as your domain authority relative to competitors. This metric is not publicized like your SERP rank, so you’ll have to use tools like Ahrefs, MOZ, and SEMRush to figure out your domain authority.
Q: What’s user behavior?
A: Once customers land on your web pages, do they check out your website and leave, or do they submit their information and become a potential lead? Figuring out how people interact with your website can help you understand how to improve your conversion rate.
Q: How do I track user behavior?
A: You can track user behavior using Google analytics. Once you’ve installed the requisite tracking tokens on your web pages, you can head over to “Audience” on Google analytics to see where your visitors are coming from, which countries they are browsing from, the type of devices and browsers they are using to access your website and so on.
There’s much more to measuring SEO metrics than what we’ve discussed here. For more about Google Analytics, stay tuned for the next installment in our SEO FAQ series!
