Nowadays, a brand’s online performance is imminently linked with its keyword performance. To that end, the keyword ranking performance metric is of utmost importance to marketers, allowing them to gauge the efficacy of their SEO efforts. Expressly, keyword rankings are dependable indicators that facilitate information concerning your business’ capabilities of enhancing its existing rankings, or assessing the effectiveness of new keywords, and so on and so forth.
To that end, SEO is a key component in the big marketing picture. It should be analyzed in relation with other elements such as the return on marketing investment and the goal completion rate.
A Closer Look at the Keyword Performance Metric
In plain English, a keyword represents a search term used in search engines such as Bing or Google. It is usually assessed in comparison with the click-through rate (CTR). The click-through rate represents the percentage of searchers that actually click on the search listing, in comparison with the number of times the listing appears on the page results.
Most experts indicate that the CTR is a critical metric that most marketers should assess, as it highlights the quality score of the keywords. At the same time, this points the relevance factor of the ads, and whether they are relevant to searchers or not.
Moving on, another quintessential aspect is setting goals that are relevant to your industry and the type of business you run. More specifically, you should have a set of goals for your audience, such as subscribing to a mailing list. Meanwhile, the completion rate represents the number of web visitors, divided by the number of goals that were completed.
So, how do you assess your firm’s efficacy when it comes to keyword performance? Essentially, you should aim at enhancing the rankings for both the keyword and certain keyword groups. Concurrently, you should aim at improving the click-through-rate for given keywords. And lastly, your focus should be maximizing the completion rate for organic traffic visitors.
What Challenges Should You Be Aware of?
With the release of key updates such as Hummingbird, Penguin or Panda, the search engine marketing realm is continually changing. Due to these results, many businesses have embraced the black hat tactics. These refer to questionable building approaches such as content overflowing with keywords, in favor of the white hat tactics, which entail actually creating quality content and utilizing relevant keywords.
As the search engine marketing continues to develop, the significance keywords have is prone to decrease (not disappear, though), whereas the significance of other key metrics regarding keyword performance is likely to increase.
Note that having a stagnant list of keywords is a dangerous practice as it overlooks the existing trends and new information concerning keywords. To that end, your focus should be to track your organic traffic to your landing pages, to pinpoint if the keywords you intend to rank are efficient or the other way around. As long as you comprehend these key guidelines, you’ll be on the right path.