When you’re trying to build an effective SEO strategy for your business, or you’re a digital marketer providing SEO services for your clients, there are many metrics by which you can measure your success. This can include things like click rate, page visits, conversion rates, and more. However, often, the proof of a good SEO strategy can be found in ensuring that your targeted web pages feature on the search engine results pages (SERPs.) Here, we’re going to look at how you measure success through your targeted SERPs, and what techniques can help you reach it.
Publish Valuable and Authoritative Content
Content is king when it comes to SEO. At this point, it’s a cliche to say it but it doesn’t make it any less true. If you want your site to rank well, you need to have valuable, informative, and authoritative content that answers questions that your potential visitors are likely to be looking for. When it comes to what makes content valuable, the likelihood of being read and providing the answers that your visitors are looking for comes first, but there are other elements of website content that deserve some attention, as well. Always keep the target audience of your content in mind, and address their pain points first and foremost. Make sure that your content is well written and as free of errors as possible, as well.
Get Your Metadata In Order
Don’t neglect to add the relevant metadata to your web pages before you publish them. How search engines interpret and display your website can largely be determined by it. Title tags, meta descriptions, and headers allow search engines to better understand the page’s structure, the topics that it addresses, and the questions that it might answer. Keep your titles descriptive but concise and make sure that you’re hitting your target keywords within your metadata at well. With well-optimized metadata, you can great mprove both your clickthrough rates and your rankings. It also tends to make your site easier for readers to engage with, as well.
Getting Those Rich Snippets With Schema
There are advanced SEO tactics, like scheme makeup, that can help your website stand out even more. If you learn how to use schema markup, you can learn not only how to get your page climbing in the SERP rankings, but you can also generate rich snippets of your page. These are the chunks of your content that can be promoted and displayed in SERPs, independently of the typical ranking of pages. They’re typically used to display information like frequently asked questions or specific information that is a part of the whole topic, but not the entire page. Rich snippets tend to get people engaging with your content, with the faith that Google is presenting the most relevant and authoritative content first and foremost.
Ensure You Have a Google My Business
Generating rich snippets allows you to get more of the screen real estate on SERPs, which makes it more likely for users to engage with your content first and foremost. A Google My Business profile can do much the same. If someone searches for your specific business or service, the profile can appear beside search results, often providing the most relevant information first and foremost, like a link to your site, reviews, hours of operation, and contact details. This can make it a lot easier for your potential customers nad clients to find your business, and also encourages customers to leave reviews, which, in turn can improve your future engagement KPIs.
Optimize Your Site For Mobile
Getting more of your site on the screen is a laudable goal, but you should be aiming to get your site on more screens, as well. Mobile device SERPs are often different from those seen on desktop or laptop devices because search engines tend to prioritize those that have mobile-optimized websites that are responsible to differently-sized screens. If mobile users are clicking off of your website, your bounce rate will increase for those devices, which makes your site less likely to get promoted to mobile device users. Google, in particular, uses mobile-first indexing, which makes mobile optimization one of the first things it looks at not just for mobile SERPs, but for SEO purposes in general. Do not ignore this step.
Success in SERPs is about more than just which pages rank at the top, alone. With a more comprehensive strategy, you can get a lot more real estate in exchange for the right searches. Worth keeping in mind.
