Does your website receive as many visitors per day as you would like? Is your bounce rate as low as you would like it to be? If not, you may be reading this article because you need help gaining traffic to your site. With billions of websites on the internet, it’s hard to appear on the first page of search results. An SEO report can help you know what is stopping your site from appearing on the first page.
SEO can be quite time-consuming, so you want to make sure you are on the right track before you spend hours fixing something on your website just to find out it wasn’t the problem. Before making any optimizations to your site, you need to know where you stand in terms of issues, rankings, and your competitors. Luckily, there are many tools out there to help you find this data, some are free and some only offer paid plans. If you are looking for some quick information about your site’s SEO, use an SEO report card.
Below are six ways you can measure your SEO successes using an SEO report card and an explanation of each metric.
Rank Analysis
A rank analysis tells you how well you rank for the main keywords for your brand. An SEO report card might ask you to enter a few keywords that you want to rank for. It will then tell you where you rank for those keywords across multiple search engines. The goal is to rank number one.
If you rank on the first page, that is good, but if you rank on the third page, that means you need to put some time into your SEO and focus on ranking.
Backlinks
A backlink is a link on another site that links back to your site. Backlinks help raise the authority of your site because they are like a review or vote of confidence from another site. Most SEO reports will tell you how many links you have. It’s good to look at your competitors to see how many links they have. For the most part, the more links you have, the better. But, backlinks coming from spam sites can hurt your SEO. Make sure to look through your links to see if they are high quality.
On-Site Analysis
On-site or on-page SEO looks at all SEO elements on your site. An on-site analysis will give you information about your headings, keywords, and content. For example, if you are not using your keywords in the right places, it might say you need to use your keyword in your titles. Or, if your content is too long, it might say there is an issue with the length of your content.
Website Speed
We all know the feeling of intense anger when it takes a page 3 minutes to load. If that’s the case for your website, that’s probably the reason why your website doesn’t get much traffic. Website speed is very important for user experience and SEO. Did you know 40% of people leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load? If your website loads slowly, your users will get frustrated and leave your site. The result is a high bounce rate.
One of the key things to look at in your SEO report is page speed. If your page speed is low, don’t fret; there are multiple ways to increase speed by fixing your site’s code and making images as concise as possible. A good load time is under 2 seconds.
Conversion Rate
One of the most significant things you can check for in your SEO report is your conversion rate. This tells you how many people follow through with actions on your website, such as signing up for your monthly newsletter, purchasing your product, or leaving a review. Knowing your conversion rate will help you to better understand if people are utilizing features on your website, and if not, how you can make them. It might mean you need to make certain buttons on your website more prominent or change your CTA so people will convert.
Domain Authority
Domain authority is a trust metric. The higher the number, the more trustworthy your website is. You want your domain authority to be above ten but it is always something to try and improve. It’s helpful to look at your competitors’ domain authorities to see where you are in comparison to them.
SEO Report Card Takeaways
Every SEO report card includes an overall score out of 100 based on your results for the other metrics outlined above. It’s important to check your score every month or so to see how your website is trending. SEO is a slow process, so if you make changes to your site based on your report card findings and don’t see an immediate improvement, don’t worry! Check back in a few weeks and things will probably have changed.
