With all the changes in Google algorithms, SEO remains a hot topic when it comes to web design, search and social marketing. In the past 10 years many small companies made a killing being “SEO experts” while pulling a bit of a bait and switch on unknowing small business owners. For an ongoing amount of $299 a month blogs were written and websites “optimized”. 5 keywords chosen and repeated in every blog at nauseam and BOOM they were optimized (or so these experts said)! And traffic…oh, it happened, but NOT the kind of traffic that resulted in sales.
Sadly, many small business owners still invest in this type of incorrect SEO and spend nights wondering when will they see the ROI in their bottom line? These past methods of SEO targeted gaining the system, so to speak; currently, Google’s continual algorithmic change has made that virtually impossible.
So, how do you know that the company you hire to execute SEO Optimization efforts will result in sales growth for your business? Will you actually be able to see a positive return on your investment?
Here are four signs that your SEO is working for your business!
- Continual website growth. EVERY single business owners needs to have Google Analytics set up on their company website. You don’t have to be a marketing genius to know how much traffic you are getting and what the traffic is doing for you. If your SEO dollars are proving results then you should see a steady increase in traffic.
- Decreasing bounce rate. Bounce rate reflects two things. Number one, is your traffic the proverbial “one minute man”? If your visitors are coming to your home page and staying less than one minute before exiting your website then you have a problem. They did not find what they were looking for based on what they searched in google. Number two, are you keeping them interested? Web traffic needs to leave your home page to go deeper into your website to understand more about your business and the services provided. (CLUE: If one of your internal pages of your website has a high bounce rate then it is time to make some changes on that page because it is doing you no favors).Now, let me make a disclaimer here: Bounce rate is a bit subjective due how they are being lured into the website. If your guests come through landing pages to get a free sample of lotion, then you will have a 100% bounce rate once they sing up for the free sample (pssst, it is a good idea to start nurturing them with marketing automation to get them to come back to the website to buy, buy, buy).
- Increased quality leads. Simple on here, guys…are you getting the leads that are closing into sales and paying the bills? If the leads suck then you are lighting SEO dollars on fire.
- Clean indexing from with Google Webmaster Tools. What does this mean? Google is constantly crawling the internet to index new content available (this is the reason companies need to be blogging on a regular basis). If google indexes something in your site and it registers “crawling errors” than you have a problem and your search ranking will be impacted negatively. An important part of SEO is making sure the content uploaded to the website is relevant and all of the pages are working on the website. Here is an image of what you might see if you have some crawling errors.
The components that make up SEO are extensive and by no means stop here. The important thing to take away from our blog is that this is a bit of a symptom checker for SEO. If you fail any of these metrics then you might want to put your current SEO provider on notice and start interviewing a replacement.
Citation: Clickfunnels VS Leadpages
