In our last article, we talked about the importance of website psychology to hook potential customers. Now, let’s assume that your website is already up and running; the next logical step is to measure its success. How? Here’s our take.
Aside from a well-designed website, a known way to increase website performance is search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your search engine rankings. In a nutshell, it’s a set of tactics geared to make your website relevant not just in your viewer’s eye, but also Google’s. These tactics involve creating engaging content that your readers will share, inserting relevant keywords so that search engines can easily index it, and last but not the least; ensuring that its on-page elements are optimized.
Once all of these are in place and done, tracking tools come in for measurement. The 5 following tools are widely used and are recommended by many SEO experts.
Google Analytics (GA)
This is Google’s free analytics tool and is hailed to be the “most critical of all”* because it helps you track WHY your site lost or gained traffic. It also allows you to track your ROI per keyword in case you have paid campaigns. You can pinpoint which keywords bring in the most number of traffic, your site’s bounce rate (% of visitors that navigate away from your site after only viewing 1 page) and even the demographics of your audience.
One of the biggest advantages of GA is its ease of use and navigation that even a newbie can learn it in a matter of days or weeks.
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)
This goes hand-in-hand with GA. While GA tells you about your site’s traffic and audience profile, this free toolset helps diagnose crawl errors (faults in your site’s on-site structures) to make your site rank better. GWT is like your site’s in-house physician because it oversees its “health.” Just like GA, the Webmaster Tool is not hard to use, but it takes time to get familiar with its ins and outs.
It is important to keep your site’s “health” at its peak because it is the back bone of your SEO efforts.
Screaming Frog
This is a desktop program that sends a “spider” (term for algorithms that crawl your site) to a site and compiles a report on the pages it crawled. It will see the site’s title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, etc. This tool examines the overall feel of your site and it quickly shows any major technical issues that it may have. The basic version is free, but it can upgraded.
HootSuite
This social media dashboard tool allows you to schedule and simultaneously post updates on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and other major social media networks. HootSuite has its own analytics features that include data on post reach and engagement. Just like Facebook Insights, it has your audience’s demographics and traffic data.
This is recommended for sites that want to engage heavily in social media. The starter package is free, but paid plans start at $10/month and come with additional features.
Quora
Content ideation is an integral part of your site. Filling your site with fresh, relevant, and value-oriented content is a must and this tool is good source if you want ideas on different topics.
This is not exactly a tool per se, but a social community of people from different industries. You can ask questions and anyone can answer. A single question can lead to new ideas because of the answers and it can help you identify topics for new articles.
In Summary:
Having tools that help you track your success aids in better decision-making for your marketing strategies. These five tools are just the basics, but if you find yourself in very need-specific situations in the future, there are others that will address your concerns.
In the meantime, we hope that these tools will help lead you to successful marketing campaigns.