Our Marketing Agency has a unique approach towards SEO for SMB clients. We first summarize the top-level metrics into 3 categories : Traffic , Engagement & Authority.
SEO Top-level metrics
First and foremost, it’s important to understand the current traffic breakdown.
This pie-chart explains the volume and percentage of traffic coming from organic, social & direct.
In this case, 97% comes from direct channel & social which is great as it shows strong brand recall & loyalty.
This means we need to work on SEO as we are generating only 3% traffic from organic search right now.
The second high-level metric is Engagement. This can be understood by brand mentions & likes/comments/shares coming from all social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quora etc.
Authority is the most important metric to monitor the progress of your SEO performance. It comprises of two components namely – backlinks and domain authority. Here’s the SEO summary metrics dashboard sample:
The above element of the dashboard has five items. The total visits item will help you know the visits to your website once it is connected to the google analytics. The second item Web Mentions will help us to understand the brand mentions on the page that was set up for crawling. The next item is Interaction which will help us to understand the interactions with you on your social network like @mentions or comments/likes/shares. The next item Network Size will help us to know the total backlinks. The last one is Domain Authority which will help us to understand how likely domain is to rank based on how search engines consider its backlink profile.
Branded keywords vs Non-Branded keywords analysis
We should come up with a list of top 10 branded keywords & non-branded keywords. We then analyze the keyword ranking for these keywords.
We can see that none of the branded keywords is in top 10 rankings. This means there is a great opportunity to optimize your business for search engines. And, there’s only 1 non-branded keyword in top 10. It clearly shows the website needs SEO. If your business is also struggling with poor keyword rankings check out our SEO services.
Search Engine Traffic Monthly Dashboard
I’m a visual person so I prefer creating a monthly dashboard to track SEO progress. The chart on the left-hand side shows you search volume trends by day for this month for both branded vs Non-branded keywords. At the bottom, you will find 2 metrics to understand (MoM) growth in branded keywords compared to the non-branded keywords.
The pie-chart explains the break-down of search traffic by Bing & Google for US and Non-US audience (assuming you are from US). At the center of the pie-chart you can quickly see that 42% of the total website traffic came from organic search i.e. for 132.7K web visitors a month we got 42% from organic search.
The 132.7K visitors displayed on dashboard is for total web traffic. We can see that the traffic has grown by 200%. The 80K visitors displayed on the dashboard is for top 20 keywords. It helps to understand the top performing keywords and the volume they generate. We can see that there is a growth of 7% in web traffic for top 20 keywords. The 4.1K number displayed on the dashboard is for average traffic generated from top 10 blogs. This helps us to understand how our blogs are performing this month. It seems we are doing slightly better compared to the last month i.e. 3% MoM growth.
The above dashboard clearly tells us that the company should focus on SEO. They need to further optimize top 20 keywords and top 10 blog posts by undertaking keyword research and On-Page optimizations. We help our SMB clients with our unique keyword bucketing strategy and by performing crawl analytics on blog posts.
Crawl Diagnostics
The crawl diagnostics will show you the total issues and classify them into high, medium and low priority issues. This will help us to understand the issues that need immediate attention.
You can see the details of exact issues affecting the website SEO. For an example, we can see lot of broken links i.e. 4xx errors. Another major issue seems to be missing meta-description tags. Another major issue is the length of the blog post titles. We need to optimize these blog titles.
Link Analysis
This will firstly give you total number of external followed and linking root domain and an analysis of domain authority of you vs. your competitor.
We can use Google console to find out the external followed links and linking root domains. We can see 221 domains are driving 6010 links to our website. The graph shows you the web traffic from referring links for everyday. This will help us in our SEO link analysis to optimize for high inbound external links.
SEO Page Indexing
In this example, we can see that the site is recently launched. The good news is that there is no errors or warnings. We have to constantly monitor the coverage section of google console to ensure that all our web pages are indexed by the search engine.
XML Sitemaps
It is very important to submit the sitemaps to google search console to index your webpages faster on google and make it easier for Google bot to navigate your website. I have used SEO Yoast to create sitemaps for my website. Then, I copied the links to sitemaps and submitted them individually to Google search console.
SERP Analysis
- Select keywords you can rank for
- Earn quality links
- Research your competitors’ keywords
- Prepare quality content
We, at Exact Funnel perform SERP analysis for our clients to help them rank higher for the keywords they want to target. Read about our SEO services to know more about our offerings or contact us.
