A proper SEO strategy boosts organic ranking and overall website traffic. However, if your business aims to target local buyers, the focus should be on strengthening your local SEO efforts. Optimizing your local search presence helps to thrive your online business. However, SEO is never a one-and-done thing, and the same rule applies to local SEO as well.
A local search engine optimization strategy should be backed by a calculated and measurable local SEO audit. This is important because local buyers end up buying the product or service on the same day after finding a suitable one. Thus, conducting local SEO audits regularly is a must for businesses wanting to capitalize on their local buyers.
Local SEO KPIs to Audit for Your Next Campaign
When it comes to local SEO metrics, there are plenty that should be audited before launching the campaign. We have listed here the essential local SEO metrics to track for local business growth.
1. Growth in Organic Traffic
Growth in organic traffic implies that your website is getting more footfall. A website with a consistent flow of new and qualified visitor traffic has more growth opportunities.
Organic traffic is the most important metric for every brand. Websites with low visitor traffic receive less conversion. Therefore, your local SEO audit should start with tracking growth in organic search traffic.
Tracking growth in organic traffic will help you garner deeper insights into whether or not your existing efforts are working. Track and check this metric to improve your efforts further.
Targeting the organic traffic unearths several potential issues with the website SEO strategy. For example, drop-in organic rankings indicate issues with the technical SEO of your business website. Likewise, if you find good organic traffic but fewer clicks, there may be some audience targeting issues.
2. Organic vs Other Website Traffic
Traffic in any form can help you grow your website. It’s quite important to compare website traffic coming from sources other than organic search. Other forms of traffic may include paid traffic, referral traffic, and traffic coming from social media. You can use Google Analytics to compare traffic coming from these sources.
3. The conversions for organic traffic
Tracking organic traffic provides you insights into actual traffic but it doesn’t tell anything about the traffic quality. Tracking the organic conversions metric from the traffic can ascertain the quality of the traffic your website is receiving. Make sure to include this metric in your local SEO audit to confirm whether your efforts are effective in attracting a qualified target audience.
With organic conversion tracking, you can quickly find if the traffic is converting into customers. If the answer is no, your website is attracting irrelevant leads. To track organic conversions, head to GA and launch a goal setup.
4. Visibility of your listing
Unless your prospects easily find your local business, your efforts won’t yield results. To ensure that your local business is discoverable, track your local Google Map Rankings and Google My Business Insights.
Both metrics are crucial to your local business growth in terms of audience engagement. Local Google Map Rankings indicate the Google Maps result of your listing whereas Google My Business insights offer the number of people who saw and engaged with your listing.
5. Website User Engagement
As Google has added user experience as an important ranking signal, you should consider user experience as important as backlinks and website content. A sudden spike in bounce rate indicates that your content is stale, outdated, and not informative enough for your target audience. Informative and quality content boosts engagement at scale. Google considers these engagement metrics to rank a website.
While running an SEO audit, you should focus on these metrics. Keep watching your website bounce rate to find the number of people leaving your page immediately after landing on it. Other engagement metrics to find here are the time your visitors spend on a particular page and the number of pages your visitors view during each session.
6. Technical Errors and Crawalability Issues
Crawling issues and technical errors hit your website hard despite all the good efforts being made. Crawling errors prevent Google from accessing and indexing your website content properly. Similarly, technical errors such as slow loading speed or HTTP errors can affect your SEO ranking as well.
Though it’s not a primary aspect to look for during the audit, checking the crawl patterns can help you determine potential errors. It throws light on how the search engine bots crawl your website. The audit helps you to improve your content publishing strategy. Finding technical errors on your website and fixing them on an immediate basis is important for website health.
Conclusion:
SEO is an ongoing process. Even a perfectly timed and well-planned strategy takes time to show up results. Patience and regular audits are the keys here. If you have your local SEO strategy in place, just check one or two metrics every once in a while to find the progress and scope of further improvements.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.
