SEO is one of the most talked about topics in SEO, but it's also one of the most misunderstood. The reality is that SEO is the process of improving your website so that search engines will rank it higher for certain keywords and phrases. 

It's a lot more complicated than just writing content about things people search for, but when done right, it can help you increase traffic and sales. The problem is that most people have no idea if their SEO Brisbane strategy is working or not. 

If your website isn't showing up higher in Google search results than before, then you might be wondering: Is my SEO working?

In this post, we'll cover some key indicators that will help you figure out if your site's rankings are increasing due to improvements in organic visibility—or if you're wasting time on tactics that don't work or even make matters worse.

Track Your Organic Traffic

The first step to knowing if SEO Brisbane is working for you is to track your organic traffic over time. Using Google Analytics, you can do this in a few different ways.

  • Track your organic traffic by keyword. You can see which keywords are bringing the most traffic to your site and how well they're performing by reviewing the "Organic Keywords" report. This report shows keywords that drive traffic to your website, indicates their position on search engine results pages (SERPs), average monthly searches per month, cost per click (CPC), impressions, clicks and CTR—as well as whether they were clicked from paid ads or organic search results.
  • Track your organic landing page performance by using GA's Content Experiments feature: You'll be able to see which version of a landing page converts better than others; however, note that there are some limitations to this tool (e.g., it doesn't support certain types of testing).

Check Your Crawl Health

The crawl health report is a great place to start, as it will show you the number of pages that Google has been able to crawl and render. You should be familiar with some common issues:

  • Crawl errors are when Google can't access your page, or it takes too long for them to do so. These can be caused by a lot of things ranging from server problems or other technical issues to duplicate URLs on your site (which we talked about earlier).
  • A robots.txt file is basically a way for webmasters to tell search engines what not to index, and this mistake happens all too often. If you have one set up on your website, make sure it actually reflects how you want search engines like Googlebot to behave!
  • Canonical tags are used in situations where two pages have near-identical content but should be treated differently because they serve different purposes (e.g., mobile vs desktop versions).
  •  Make sure these are set up correctly so that Google knows which URL is "the real deal" and which one should be ignored when crawling through your site. If you don't set them correctly, then all kinds of problems could occur, including duplicate content!

Audit Your Links

A link audit is a way to figure out what the quality of your links is and how they can help or hurt SEO. It's also a way to identify bad links so that you can do something about them.

A link audit looks at the different types of links you have on your site: do they pass authority and trust? 

SEO

Analyse Your Content

If you're using SEO to improve your digital marketing, it's important to be able to tell if your strategy is working or not. That's where analytics comes in.

To get a better picture of how well SEO is working for you, there are two places where you should be looking: Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

In Google Analytics, you can see how each piece of content performs across various metrics like time on site, bounce rate and conversions (among others). You can also see what keywords people are searching for that lead them here. 

In fact, Google Analytics lets you monitor revenue too! With this data at hand, it'll be easier than ever before to determine whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off.

Time on page

Time on page, or TOP, is a metric that measures the average amount of time users spend on your site before they leave. It's also known as "time spent consuming."

If you want to track this metric, you'll need to install Google Analytics and set up its standard tracking code on all pages of your website. 

Once installed and configured correctly, you can use an advanced segment in Google Analytics called "Top Sessions" to see which pages are getting the most time on them (and thus receiving the most attention). Just click Search Traffic > Behaviors > Site Content > All Pages and then choose Top Sessions from the drop-down menu under "Select A Metric To Analyse."

The results will show which pages have received the most sessions over a selected date range (e.g., last 30 days) or specific day range (e.g., yesterday). You can filter these results by country and device type as well as sort by Page Views or Unique Pageviews if desired.

Conversions

To determine whether your SEO Brisbane efforts are paying off, you need to be able to measure the impact they're having on your website's performance. Conversions are the ultimate goal of any SEO campaign: clicks, sales and form fills can all count as conversions.

To track these metrics in Google Analytics, you'll need to set up goals that indicate when a user has converted (for example, by filling out a contact form). 

You'll want to set up goals for each conversion type you want to track: if you want phone calls from potential buyers or clients, define a goal that tracks phone calls; if people sign up for an email list after visiting your site, set up an email list subscription goal; if someone clicks through from one of your blog posts or social media posts directly onto a product page where they make their purchase(s), create a conversion goal for each product page on which this happens.

Once these goals are set up—and depending on how many different conversions occur per month—you can see exactly how much traffic leads directly toward each one (and thus understand which ones have been most effective).

Landing pages

Landing pages are a critical part of the conversion process. These pages should be optimised for conversions, designed to match the content of your website and have a clear call to action.

Landing pages are mobile-friendly, so make sure you test them on mobile devices before going live.

Landing pages should be designed to match your website and have a clear call to action. Your landing page should also be mobile-friendly, so make sure you test it on different devices before going live.

Conclusion

We hope you've found this guide to be helpful in your quest to measure and improve your SEO Brisbane. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out! We love hearing from our readers.