Intro
Whether you're a small business owner, digital marketing expert, or both, it's important to know how your website is performing.
A high-quality presence on the web can be a powerful tool for reaching potential customers and building brand awareness among your target audience. But for this to happen, you need to have an accurate sense of where your site stands regarding its digital footprint.
There are several ways you can measure your site's digital presence: from organic search traffic (or lack thereof) to keyword ranking and click-through rates — to domain authority and quality backlinks. The goal is to attract visitors to your website and have them stick around once they arrive.
In this article, we'll dive into each one of these metrics so that by the end you'll understand their impact on your digital presence.
Let's take a closer look.
What is a digital presence?
Digital presence refers to how your company or organization is represented online. It's the sum of all your digital assets: your website, social media accounts, blog posts, and more.
It's not just about how many followers you have or how many times people visit your website — a digital presence is about how people perceive your brand, from their perspective as consumers.
The All-in-One Platform for Effective SEO
Behind every successful business is a strong SEO campaign. But with countless optimization tools and techniques out there to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Well, fear no more, cause I've got just the thing to help. Presenting the Ranktracker all-in-one platform for effective SEO
We have finally opened registration to Ranktracker absolutely free!
Create a free accountOr Sign in using your credentials
Your digital presence should be engaging, informative, and consistent across all platforms.
If you want to improve your digital presence, you'll want to do things like:
- Create more content (articles, guest posts, blogs, infographics) that's relevant and interesting to your audience.
- Build more backlinks to your website from other websites — not only will this help people find your site in search results. But it also shows Google that you're an authority on a topic (and thus deserving of higher rankings).
The importance of measuring your digital presence
Measuring a digital presence is important for several reasons.
It helps you understand what is working and what isn't so that you can optimize your website and digital marketing campaigns.
It also allows you to measure the ROI of your digital marketing campaigns so that you know if they are delivering on their promises or not.
7 factors to consider for your SEO campaign
Whether you're a small business or a large corporation, it's important to have a strong web presence.
And when it comes to search engine optimization, there are many factors that can help you achieve this success.
Let's dive into the best way to measure your digital presence by focusing on seven key SEO factors:
1. Organic search traffic
Organic search traffic is a measure of the number of people who come to your site organically, via search engine results. It's important because it shows how many people have found you online using organic search terms and phrases.
The All-in-One Platform for Effective SEO
Behind every successful business is a strong SEO campaign. But with countless optimization tools and techniques out there to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Well, fear no more, cause I've got just the thing to help. Presenting the Ranktracker all-in-one platform for effective SEO
We have finally opened registration to Ranktracker absolutely free!
Create a free accountOr Sign in using your credentials
Organic search can be measured by looking at your analytics or leveraging an SEO tool — this will tell you how many people are viewing your site from Google or other search engines.
Ranktracker graphs show instant overviews of your visibility, traffic, average search engine position, and more.
(Image Source: Ranktracker)
If you want more organic traffic, there are three main things to consider: high-quality content, links from other sites, and images.
Don't underestimate the power of images. They help readers understand your article with ease and quickly add an appealing element to your posts to illustrate a point.
Since visual search is becoming more prominent, proper image SEO will greatly help improve your organic traffic. Make sure to use an online photo editor to make sure your images are good quality but also optimized for web and SEO.
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
2. Keyword ranking
One of the most important things you can do to optimize your website is to determine how well it's doing regarding keyword ranking. This refers to how well a certain keyword or phrase ranks within search results when someone searches for that term or phrase.
If you're looking at improving the digital presence of your company, there are many ways in which keyword rankings can help you do this.
(Image Source: Ranktracker)
The first thing to keep in mind when evaluating keyword rankings is that they're not static — they change frequently depending on what people are searching for. That means that even if a site ranks well today, it might not tomorrow — unless the owner actively works toward maintaining high rankings by optimizing web pages for specific keywords and phrases (or search terms).
You should also know that there are many different types of searches: there are broad searches like general terms (tables) and long tail searches like very specific phrases (mid century modern dining tables).
Broad searches usually result in less traffic than longtail ones because their reach is too wide. On the other hand, longtail keywords often have higher conversion rates because they lead people directly to what they want without giving them any other options.
Leverage a keyword research tool to help outshine your competition and rank higher in search results.
(Image Source: Ranktracker)
3. Click-through rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is a measure of the number of people who click on a link to your website, as a percentage of all readers who saw it.
CTR is a valuable metric because it indicates how relevant your content is to the user. A high CTR means that you are doing a good job of engaging the user and encouraging them to act.
However, it's important not to interpret this result too literally: even if CTR is low for one piece of content or campaign element, there may be many reasons that happened. For example:
- The audience didn't like that particular topic
- The copy could have been unclear or confusing
- The webpage took too long to load
4. Quality of backlinks
Backlinks are required for your website to rank well on search engines, and they can come from a variety of places. But you want to make sure that the sites linking to your site are high-quality sites rather than low-quality ones.
For example, if you're trying to rank in Google for "best SEO services" or something similar and your site has been linked by a lot of other sites with poor domain authority (DA), your content still likely won't show up in Google's top results pages.
(Image Source: Ranktracker)
If links come from reputable websites with DA scores over 50, this will help improve their page ranking for those keywords. Low-quality links with low DA scores have less impact.
In this case, quality is more important than quantity.
5. Domain authority
Domain authority is an indicator of how authoritative your website is.
Domain authority follows a scale system between 1 and 100, with higher scores being better. The score is based on the number of inbound links pointing to your site (the more links you have from other sites that are related to yours) as well as the quality of those linking pages (if they're high PR sites or blog posts).
(Image Source: Ranktracker)
Your overall digital presence is strong with a DA of 50 or above. Your goal should be to get it as close to 100 as possible. However, this is no easy feat, but if you keep building high-quality content and focusing on building backlinks, anything is possible.
6. Conversions
Conversions are a good metric to measure your digital presence because they indicate how successful your SEO campaign is.
You can measure conversions in different ways, such as the number of people who make a purchase, sign up for a service, or take some other action after clicking on a search result.
Google Analytics and other similar data analytics software and google tools track conversion rates for you so you don't have to do extra work.
When you're measuring your digital presence, you want to know how many people are seeing your content and how many of those people are acting as a result.
For example, if you publish an article and no one reads it, then you should be concerned. You want as many people as possible to be reading the content you produce. But if no one has acted after reading your article — like signing up for your newsletter or clicking on a link — it's not just bad traffic — it's wasted traffic.
7. Bounce rate
According to HubSpot, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who only visit one page on your site. This can indicate that either your site is difficult to navigate, or it doesn't relate to the audience.
The All-in-One Platform for Effective SEO
Behind every successful business is a strong SEO campaign. But with countless optimization tools and techniques out there to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Well, fear no more, cause I've got just the thing to help. Presenting the Ranktracker all-in-one platform for effective SEO
We have finally opened registration to Ranktracker absolutely free!
Create a free accountOr Sign in using your credentials
High bounce rates can also be caused by a combination of the two factors: if your content isn't relevant and accessible, then it'll likely lead to low engagement. The most common causes for high bounce rates include:
- Poor user experience (UX)
- A lack of trust in the brand or company
- An outdated interface
Use a web audit tool to help identify any issues with your on-site SEO factors and learn suggestions on how to fix them.
Final thoughts
To succeed with SEO, focus on building a strong online presence, to attract new customers and convert more leads.
If you have a solid understanding of your organization's digital presence and how it is impacting your SEO campaign, then you can make smarter decisions about where to allocate your time and resources.
By measuring your digital presence, you'll be able to determine what's working and what isn't.
The idea here is to use measurement as a catalyst for change to achieve the best possible results and long-term business success.