Many people have heard of the term SEO a hundred times, but they still don’t have a basic understanding of what it is or what it encompasses. Knowing that it is a crucial digital marketing tool is mostly enough for most internet users.
However, SEO is so much more than just a tool. It’s made up of numerous different elements, and the more you know about what they are and the things they can do, the more you can leverage SEO to your advantage.
This short guide will tell you why a business should track its SEO performance and the best methods you can use to track SEO campaigns.
Navigation of Contents
Quantifying SEO outcomes that can be tracked
Before we can move on to tracking strategies, we first need to identify the main tangible outcomes of SEO. Once we understand how the benefits of SEO manifest in real-world scenarios, we can begin to look at specific metrics that you can use to track progress.
SEO drives organic search
Organic search plays a vital role in a business website’s performance and determines whether a visitor will perform an action and convert into a customer.
More importantly, it’s an essential element of the buyer funnel and contributes significantly to a brand’s visibility, turning it into a trusted resource in the eyes of search engines.
SEO helps build credibility and trust
Establishing your brand as an authority online involves offering a service or product of real value to your consumers and will result in the target audience trusting your brand.
SEO helps establish a strong foundation for a fully functional website with a positive customer experience that is easy to find across preferred search engines.
SEO helps a business understand their consumers
From understanding the main pain points of your consumers to tracking macro market shifts, SEO research is an incredibly informative source of actionable information on what your target audience wants.
It can also show you the consumer behavior and their purchasing habits to fine-tune your marketing campaigns and reduce your bounce rate.
How SEO campaigns can be tracked
One of the best ways to track and monitor your SEO campaigns is to use Google Analytics to track your performance over time and monitor the most important SEO KPIs, such as:
- Keyword rankings
- Backlink growth
- Organic search
- Conversions
- Consumer behavior
- Time spent on page
- Bounce rate
- Mobile traffic
- Direct and returning visitors
- Click-through rate
- Domain rating and authority
Another excellent method to track your SEO campaigns is to use web scraping techniques. For example, if you’re running a photography business, web scraping can help you discover the most competitive websites or allow you to scrape images from the website of your main competitor. You can then study these images and find ways to improve your style or shift your focus to subjects that sell.
Using web scraping for SEO monitoring
Web scraping can give your SEO campaigns a real boost by helping you:
- Collect keyword results.
- Extract information for guest blogging.
- Identify the best-ranking categories.
- Get accurate and up-to-date data for your content marketing campaigns.
Web scraping goes hand in hand with SEO monitoring, as it involves using a web scraper that gathers the required information from target websites. It relies on proxies, making it perfect for performing keyword research and competition monitoring without any risks of getting banned or blocked by target websites.
Benefits of using scraping
Aside from SEO monitoring, you can use web scraping for countless different purposes, such as:
- Image scraping – when we say that web scraping refers to gathering and extracting data, we don’t mean text only. The extracted data can be anything, from videos and images to plain text. Web scraping allows you to scrape images from the websites of your competitors in mere seconds.
- Pricing monitoring – for business owners, keeping an eye on the prices of their competitors is the best way to determine competitive prices for their own products and services.
- Contact scraping – modern consumers use all sorts of communication channels. These channels are an excellent source for finding contact information you need to generate more leads.
- Improving marketing campaigns – web scraping is an excellent way to find out everything about your target audience and create personalized marketing campaigns that will address their specific needs.
Conclusion
SEO is an irreplaceable aspect of running a business today. It helps organizations accomplish various goals such as improving customer experience, driving more conversions, improving lead generation, driving more traffic, increasing brand awareness, and more.
While it may seem complex because it involves so many different practices, tactics, and techniques, modern technology allows you to easily handle it and provide your business with the information it needs to thrive.