SEO professionals and digital marketers are constantly and relentlessly seeking new and unique ways of improving their clients’ online presence as well as their websites’ ranking in Google search results. On another hand, Google also keeps updating its search engine algorithm making it more challenging for online businesses to obtain a higher ranking.
This is why best search engine optimization strategies and practices keep evolving on a regular basis. If you want to measure the success of your SEO campaign, estimating organic traffic isn’t the only way. There are several other aspects of SEO success that are often overlooked by online marketers. Let’s discuss what they are.
Good SERP rankings aren’t enough!
Usually, most online businesses gauge the success of their SEO efforts based on organic traffic their sites see. The more visitors your website sees through its organic channel, the more successful SEO campaign is. But this isn’t an actual picture always.
Google search now includes results from PR and social media sites broadening the channel of organic search. Besides, Google’s search engine algorithms are now more complex and accurate making it difficult for SEO specialists to judge how the algorithm analyzes the websites.
Besides, the new feature of Google searches like the Carousel and answer box can be a game-changer for your organic search metric. Even if you are not into the top ranking, Google can still recognize quality information from your website and highlight it into the answer box.
On the other hand, although you may be ranking high, you can witness a decrease in click-through rate if your market rival gets its site content into the answer box. Thus, it is to see why the need of great quality content was never so vital before.
Understand the real source of traffic
A popular e-commerce marketplace, Groupon de-indexed its website for almost 6 hours as a part of its experiment to measure the impact of deindexing on their both organic and direct traffic. The company found that de-indexing has resulted in almost 60% decline in their direct traffic while organic traffic was almost zero. If you avoid such basic issues like no-indexing and misattribution, you can gain your site more traffic than it is credited for. There is a need to find out the real source of your website’s traffic.
Smarter browsers can shift organic traffic to direct channel
Major browsers including Google Chrome and Safari have gotten real smart today. They can quickly trace your search history when you attempt to type in the search phrase and give you immediate suggestion. Now, if you click on the browser suggested link, you are technically bypassing organic search results and thus, this will be attributed as a direct channel.
If you are a regular internet user, you probably know how today’s advanced browsers quickly understand what you are looking for even you have just typed half word or phrase. Meaning, the traffic that you were considering organic earlier is now attributed as direct traffic and thus, they might not be a part of your SEO report. But earlier performed SEO still owns the credit for it!
What’s more?
Sometimes you get website traffic from mobile apps that don’t send referral data. Thus, such leads are considered as direct traffic. Although this leads may have come as a part of your SEO strategy like local business listing, you are actually not receiving the credit for the same. In fact, Google can now direct users straight to the in-app page from the search result bypassing the website.
Bottom-line
There are many aspects of organic and paid search channels that SEO professionals or websites owners need to consider today to obtain maximum clicks and conversions. While organic traffic is still the major attribute to the SEO metric, there are many other attributes that you must consider measuring real worth of your SEO campaign.
