submitting website to search engines

The 9 Most Important Indicators From Semalt For Measuring Your Site's SEO Performance



Working in the field of e-marketing and search engine marketing or run a site to sell products or offer services, you will of course need to make improvements to your site to be compatible with search engines, for it to appear in the search results on "Google", "Bing" and other Global search engines.

But after you pay attention to the improvements; how do you know the success you have reached? Or rather, how would you determine the performance of the "SEO" on your site? 

These are the different questions we will try to answer in detail in our article today. This is very important because it is a way that will let you know the exact condition of your site. This way you can know what is wrong with your site and know the precautions to take in order to avoid losing your traffic as well as your investment.

1. Unpaid visits and sessions

Organic sessions are known as the visits that come to the site and the actions that the user performs during that visit before leaving the site. One session is also a group of actions such as browsing, making purchases, and filling in data within the site. It also allows knowing if the user stops interacting within the site. The session ends after 30 minutes and you can adjust the duration from seconds to hours.

What is the benefit of free sessions to the site?

The growth rate of free sessions and visits to the site is the most important key indicator that is in line with the objectives of improving search engines to draw attention to your site, and the reasons for traffic growth are due to a series of factors that can be identified through analysis of site data, such as internal improvement of the site to search engine compatibility and writing an attractive address for customers, as well as having a useful description of the page in search results that motivates the visitor to press and make decisions, all of which contribute to increasing free sessions on the site.

The results of free sessions on the site include raising your brand awareness and improving search engine rankings, which in turn helps to reach a large customer base, getting an excellent opportunity to turn potential customers, and free sessions are measured by Google Analytics, one of the free Google Analytics tools that provide data for marketers to improve search engine performance.

2. High ranking of keywords in search engines

Keywords are those that the user searches in search engines for a service, product or information, and the choice of keywords is linked to several factors, the most important of which is the user's intention, on which Google displays the results in the pages of the search engine (SERP).

In addition, the word rating index in the search results is the order of these words in the results pages, which you should keep an eye on, the closer you get to the first results, the better your site is ranked in the long keywords that are best searched for.

Therefore, keyword ranking is one of the key indicators of the success of the "E" strategy, as improving the order of keywords leads to an increase in traffic to your site and to more disreputable customers, which contributes to increasing the percentage of sales and profit realization, so that you have to follow the words and make the necessary improvements to continue to be successful, it is interesting to note that you can access all the keyword data via Google Analytics, one of Google's free tools to help webmasters and business owners succeed on search engines.

3. Transforming clients

The task of identifying keywords, internal and external search engine improvements is to attract potential customers to your site to start your next step in turning them into real customers to complete the sale, where the conversion process starts with the first real contact with the customer on your site and different forms of communication such as:
  • Communicate through chat
  • Send a message via e-mail
  • Register for the website newsletter
  • Phone call
  • Make the purchase directly
Thus, lead conversion is one of the key things in any business and expresses the main goal of online marketing of building a real customer base and increasing sales, and to achieve better results, Google Analytics helps marketers and site managers to track customer conversion traffic through the analysis it provides, whereby you can create a set of objectives to track the conversion path through which you, in turn, give yourself detailed data on:
  • Transfer rate by phone or computer
  • Percentage of male and female clients
  • Which pages give you better conversion results
To improve the results, we improve the conversion rate and enhance the user experience:
  • Is your site easy to use?
  • Is the purpose of the pages clear to users?
  • Is the website content trustworthy?
  • Is it possible to navigate through the site easily?
After answering them, make the needed improvements and monitor the results.

4. The bounce rate

Bounce rate reflects the rate at which users exit the page immediately after downloading without taking any action. The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of sessions in which the user has seen a page by the total number of sessions such as: when 50 sessions take place in a day with 14 sessions for a page before returning to the search engine. The calculation is the following (14/50 =0.28) and it is a good bounce rate since the usual rate varies from 40 to 60 percent and the lower the better, because it, in turn, increases Google's confidence in your site, and causes a better rating for your site.

When users search for a specific word, Google wants to show them all the results that meet and serve their needs in the search process, and when a user returns directly to the search page from a result, it gives a signal to Google that the content is inappropriate for them or not trustworthy. As Google's priority is the user, try to reduce the bounce rate by making your site convenient and easy for the user in order to level the search results above your competitors.

Discover Semalt's FullSEO method to join the top of Google

A situation where a high bounce rate isn't bad.

Before answering the question, you must know very well what the structural configuration of the site is as well as its purpose. There are two types of sites, the first: which consists of several pages and categories that you can go to from the main page (such as e-commerce sites, education blogs, news sites... etc. The user's exit directly after entering the home page or any other page harms the site. The second: which consists of one page, which may be a display page for a product (Landing Page) or a blog consisting of one page. The high rate of closing the page and returning to the search page again will not harm it. Count on that page to achieve online goals.

5. Pages and sessions

Long sessions express a good user experience and a well-organized site that allows easy navigation between its pages, as well as a fast loading rate. As we find that the sessions metric is a simple metric that measures the number of pages that the user visits in one session. So if your site has a large number of pages as for example with news sites, the user will browse a large number of pages during the session.

Therefore, track the movement of users within your site and analyze the sessions they perform to help you develop content and make improvements to the pages. Then put the appropriate "call to action" to get the real value from those visits, as a large number of sessions without interaction is not up to you.

6. Average duration of sessions

The term average session duration expresses the duration of the user's visit to the site. And the more the site is structured to information and interconnected pages through internal links in a correct manner. This will lead to the user getting a good experience inside the site and staying longer before exiting. Session duration is one of the most important indicators (KPIs) of content quality.

7. Page load time

Imagine yourself as a website user, what are the chances that you wait five seconds for the site to load completely? Of course, the probability is low. And therefore the rate of site pages' loading is one of the factors affecting search engine results. Because the longer the site loads, the higher the bounce rate of the site, which is the percentage of visitors who leave the site directly without taking any action on the site.

Also, the speed of site loading increases the opportunity to browse the site better. Thus obtaining a good and effective user experience, making the purchase or recording data, and as a result of these improvements, reaching marketing goals through search engines. On the contrary, in the case of slow loading of the site's pages, which causes a bad impression on the user, which makes the possibility of the user directly exiting it reaches 90% if the page load rate reaches five seconds.

The best time to download the pages? Is it a second or 3 seconds? Let us establish a rule together that the shorter the site load time, the more opportunities, where the ideal page load time depends on the complexity of the content and the user's patience. And based on the previous rule, the higher the page load rate of more than 3 seconds increases the bounce rate. The page loading speed can be measured through the free Google tool «Pagespeed Insights».

8. Latest exit pages

The exit page is the last page the user visited before completing his session on the site, closing the tab, or searching on another site. The Exit Pages index is also one of the positive factors in the SEO process. The user leaving the site after completing the purchase or after reaching the end of the journey that has been drawn for him inside the site is a good sign. But if a large percentage of users leave a page that you do not intend them to leave, then some improvements should be made to the user experience.

The details of the pages and the interaction within the site can be found on "Google Analytics". It helps in analyzing the pages on which the user sessions end, concluding what matters to the user, and allowing developing the interaction process within the site through improving "Call To Action" from a page, there is an essential need to make some improvements to it. 

You can make this improvement if you have some knowledge in the SEO field. But if not, I recommend you to contact our specialists for this problem to be resolved so that your site gets good results.

9. Crawling problems

Googlebot, which is responsible for indexing sites, scans your site to store data in the Google index to find site pages when you do a search, and there are two different types of Googlebot, the first is the desktop crawler that indexes websites for computers, and the second is the mobile crawler responsible for cataloging mobile websites.

Googlebot may have problems accessing your site and therefore cannot read the content in the site, evaluate the content entirely, or even determine the importance of the content to users and put it in the right place, but the problems are usually caused by a server error, i.e. failure to connect "ypnobo" to the "N" server, the expiry of the scan request, or the site has stopped working, and there are also problems related to the URL link "URL" if there is a page that no longer exists or contains a series of long redirects, these scan errors can be found via Google Search Console, so you should check the site from the webmaster to avoid errors.

Summary of the 9 most important indicators for measuring the success of the site

The SEO process is an ongoing process that doesn't stop. So, this must be done by a qualifying SEO agency. Because during monitoring, there will be new improvements that must be added to the site as it evolves. 
So, to save time and achieve good results at a lower cost, I invite you to take a look at the service offered by Semalt.
With the experts of Semalt, the success of your site will be achieved by following the most important indicators that have been mentioned, such as:
  • monitoring of free visits to the site
  • the page loading speed so that your visitors get a useful user experience
  • a solution Exploration of problems related to the appearance of your site in search engine results
  • customer conversion monitoring to improve "CTAs" within the site for profit
Because all indicators work in harmony to serve the user and your business together.