Understanding Keyword Performance
Let’s dive further into what keyword performance is. Essentially, it’s a metric that allows you to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. As Google invests more and more into its search engine, white hat tactics are starting to be preferred over black hat tactics. The former includes social sharing, as well as putting content that’s high in quality. The importance of keyword rankings has started to diminish, though it’s not expected to fully disappear at any point, while other metrics surrounding keyword performance will start to become more important.
Things to Pay Attention to
There’s a lot that goes into keyword performance, which means that when you’re analyzing it, you should keep in mind many different aspects. Sure, your website ranking number one on Google search for that keyword is an indicator that you’re in the right direction. Even if it’s not, make sure to check whether the site shows up at all using the keywords you’re targeting. However, to get the full picture of what you’re doing right, you shouldn’t stop at that.
Perhaps the most-used indicator is the number of visits that each keyword has brought, but this is not the end of the story. Consider looking into the pages per visit, which tells your how many pages visitors look at before converting, on average. Depending on the particular business considered, this number may need to be high or low.
The next thing to pay attention to is the average duration of visit, which shows how much time an individual spent on your site before they converted. For instance, if you have a video on your landing page that’s 4 minutes long, but the average time a visitor spends on it is 2 minutes, it’s a sign you should be making some changes.
The bounce rate is the most important variable of all. If you have loads of visitors coming to your website and leaving at once, it’s an indication that what’s on that website is disconnected from what your visitors want. Aim to lower the bounce rate as much as possible.
By combining this information, you’ll be able to figure out which keywords are working well, and which are not. For instance, if the number of pages visitors access is low, it could be because the keyword is not as relevant as you may wish. Same goes for the duration of their visit.
Tools to Help You
If you’re very busy and can’t afford to spend time trying to figure out how each keyword is doing, there are tools that do that for you. Below, you’ll find two great examples.
A great example of a simple tool to use in your keyword check-up is rank tracker tool. With it, you can take your SEO rank tracking efforts to new heights. It’s incredibly easy to use, even for those who don’t have loads of experience in this process, since essentially, they do all the work, figuring out the ranking of your website and researching and suggesting keywords for your to use, among other things.
Google Search Console
Another option is the set of tools offered by Google, which allows you to see many different aspects of your website’s performance, such as click-through rates, search results, position, and impressions, to name a few.
While keyword research may be an integral part of the SEO efforts of a content marketer, this shouldn’t be the end of their checking and researching. After articles are written, keyword performance is the next on a successful SEO marketer’s do-to list. This process enables them to figure out how well they picked the keywords, and how visitors are interacting with them. Then, they can make the decision to keep using that keyword or to change things up, and try something completely new. This process can be quite lengthy, but luckily, there are tools that can help make it easier.
Leave Comment