SEO could be an effective way to upgrade your position in the Google search engine results. With various efforts you can tune the Google rankings in your advantage, for example linkbuilding, on-page SEO and other techniques. We all know that a high position in the Google rankings can help you to gain more trust, get more traffic and in the end it could lead to more sales and conversion. This is the reason why you should always work on improving them. But how can you monitor your Google rankings and the growth (or drop) that you make by making certain choices? Thatâs what weâll tell you today!
What are the best steps to influence your Google rankings?
First, before we even think about measuring the results, you should learn to understand what kind of changes have influence on your ranking. Like we briefly explained in the intro of this article, there are many techniques and choices that you can make, that create growth or a drop in the search engine rankings. Our personal favourite scheme to explain this to you is the well-known âThe periodic table of SEO success factorsâ by Search Engine Land. This scheme shows exactly what you should check, do and shouldnât do to rank high in Google.
For example, in the âON-THE-PAGE SEOâ-box youâll find the factors âcontentâ, âarchitectureâ and âHTMLâ. Under each of these factors youâll find little boxes with the so called âinfluencersâ that you should check if you want to make sure that you get the best out of these ranking factors. The first one under âcontentâ is the influencer âQualityâ. Are the pages on your website well written & do they have quality content that has a value to your website? Check this influencer to make sure that Google sees the value of your content as much as you and your customers do.
The ranking factors are also influenced by the so called âpenaltyâsâ. Under the âcontentâ ranking factor you can find the penalty âThinâ. This means that, if Google and your visitors find your content to be âthinâ or âshallowâ or lacking substance, youâll be punished with a drop in the search engine results.
How can you measure the impact of SEO?
If you decide to actively try to influence your Google rankings, we could understand quite well that you would want to see the impact of your actions on the Google search engine results. It would be a pity if you find out that all your efforts are for nothing, or that you apparently do something wrong.
Measuring and processing the impact of SEO on your Google rankings can be done in many different ways, but if you want to start quickly without any hard calculations or things like that, you should follow the following four steps:
1. Determine your goals and efforts
For the clearest measurements itâs smart to determine some goals and choose your SEO efforts that you want to measure. For example, if you want to see how your webpage about âgarden toolsâ will rank after changing the âqualityâ and âkeywordâ influencers with your âcontentâ ranking factor, itâs smart to determine what kind of results you hope to get out of these changes and the time that youâll put into this. Watch out! Be realistic, your page wonât rise from the 100the position to number one in just one week.
2. Activate the page tracker
If youâre using Textmetrics, you have free access to the page tracker. This tool helps you to measure your current, past and future Google rankings to see what kind of influence the changes that you make have. If you want to learn more about the page tracker, read our article in the Textmetrics knowledge base. (only available for registered Textmetrics users, create your free account here!)
3. Start your SEO efforts
If youâve activated the page tracker, youâll be able to see the current position of your webpages. After youâve noted this in some kind of document, you should start with your SEO efforts for the determined amount of time.
4. Evaluate the Google rankings results (and start again with step 1)
After your SEO efforts youâll take a look at the results and evaluate if this is what you expected. Did your page rank higher the way you expected? Or are there still thing you should change before youâll reach the goals that you set for yourself? With this output youâll be able to start again with step 1, by determining new goals based on your previous results.