To have your website optimised you’ll want to hire a digital marketing agency that knows everything about online marketing and SEO. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t help to have a basic understanding of some of the statistics they’ll be working with. The more knowledgeable you are on the subject, the more you’ll be able to work alongside their suggestions to boost your site’s visibility even further.
The main problem when it comes to understanding SEO is that there are so many things you have to look into if you want to reach the highest heights of search engine rankings.
Though the marketing agency you choose to work with will have their own metrics for figuring out how to optimise your site, we suggest you give your greatest focus to the following four statistics, all of which have a large effect on your site’s search engine standings. There are many teams out there, but the right SEO agency that offers you results and constant interaction will take a bit more time to find. Be patient; great ideas take time to build, and they are completely up to you. In no particular order:
1) Your PageRank
Google PageRank is a system Google uses to figure out the importance of a single web page (not a website as a whole; it’s normal for your pages to have different ranks).
Your PageRank is determined by a number of factors, though, as you’d imagine, your PageRank is of no importance on other search engines, such as Yahoo and Bing, as this was built purely for Google’s use. There are many ways of building your PageRank, and like SEO in general these methods are constantly changing and moving with the times. One of the best ways to improve your PageRank nowadays is to have a large number of Facebook ‘likes’ or Twitter shares on any particular page.
2) Unique Content
You and your agent could focus on all the SEO tips and tricks in the world, but this won’t mean a thing if you’re not producing unique content. If a huge push manages to get you to the top of the rankings, your flood of new visitors will bounce from your site the moment they arrive, which will push you back on the rankings in a few weeks.
For this reason, we recommend that you spend this time focusing all your efforts on producing high quality, unique content, while leaving your agency to focus on the SEO side of things. When you have a marketing agency working on your behalf, you know you’ll see improved rankings in short time-as long as you have the unique content to match.
3) Integrating Your Google+ Profile
Introduced in 2011, Google+ still has not managed to gain that much steam even though the people at Google are doing all they can to push it into everyday use. They do so by massively increasing the importance of Google +1’s and profile integration with your site in order to get more people using the social network.
If you haven’t linked your Google+ profile with your website you should do so right away, as the SEO benefits are enormous. Once linked, your Google+ profile picture will show up in standard SERPs alongside your website page links. This means even if you’re only the fourth result down on a page, there’s a good chance you will instantly catch a potential customer’s eye.
4) Your Bounce Rate
It’s only been within the last few years that people have sat up and paid attention to bounce rates. Your bounce rate, simply put, is the percentage of people that visited your website or a particular page and left immediately.
Many pages have high bounce rates, which certainly isn’t good, but it’s to be expected with the fickle nature of the internet. You should keep an eye on your bounce rates regardless, as percentages above industry standards and your competitors could see you fall in the rankings.
Hiring a SEO specialist to help you boost the visibility of your website is highly beneficial. However, it is important that you are aware of the most important statistics so that you’ll know whether strategies are working or not.
