Smart SEO Tactics for a Winning SEO Strategy

Are your SEO efforts not enough to outrank competition? Try these easy wins and smart opportunities. 

Learn how to improve your landing page performance in search results and how to measure your success. We’ll also go through practical examples which will help you understand SEO activities better. 

We prepared some tips & tricks which will enable you to measure SEO performance more accurately and also to monitor your achieved and continuous results.

How to measure your organic traffic more accurately?

The brand and non-brand segmentation is a very important part to understand when selecting the right package of keywords. Branded keywords are usually positioned in the top results and they bring more conversions, because customers intent is closer to “Buy” phase of the consumer decision journey. Branded keywords also represent a great control group, meaning if these keywords lose in rank greatly, you need to check your website as soon as possible.

If your website mostly ranks on branded keywords then there is a lot of potential for optimizing on non-branded keywords. SEOmonitor enables you to quickly see the ratio of branded and non-branded keywords and filter between them. This saves you a lot of time since you don’t have to manually filter it in spreadsheets. 

Track and compare branded and non-branded keywords with ease

SEOmonitor enables tracking unlimited numbers of branded and limited numbers of non-branded keywords. Keywords are tracked on desktop and mobile devices on a daily basis to help you check your progress at all times. 

The charts below show branded and non-branded organic traffic growth in comparison to previous year.

If we look at the chart above we can see the significant rise in organic visits on search queries that were brand-related and have been uncovered from Google Search Console over time. There is still room for improvement by optimizing location and product-related brand queries which have a high conversion rate from the perspective of search intention. It is also possible to track all of your set goals in Google Analytics with SEOmonitor.

Monitoring the right keywords is crucial for your business success and is something you will manage to do in the first steps with this tool, right after you set up your first SEO campaign. The tool is able to uncover 90% of the non-provided traffic data.

If you filter your non-brand-related keywords, you can compare the organic traffic in the selected timeframe. From the chart above, we can conclude that the non-brand organic traffic has increased by 233.57% after SEO activities. Overall, the website now gets more constant visits throughout the season and since it ranks for more relevant keywords and topics, conversions have also increased by 389.26%.

SEOmonitor also labels keywords by seasonality which helps you prioritize your SEO activities. When the label is yellow, the marked keyword’s season is approaching soon. This is the right time to start optimizing for related keywords so that your landing pages will be ready and on top positions when peak of the season arrives.

SEO campaign tab also helps you to prepare your keywords plan based on relevant SEO indicators and metrics, such as:

• ranking position,
• opportunity,
• search volume,
• difficulty,
• YoY comparison and
• Conversions.

If we look at the picture above, it would make sense to plan SEO-friendly content for keyword with 1,600 monthly searches and low difficulty to get it to appear among the TOP 3 results. It would also make sense to get more backlinks from high authority sites to the highest ranking landing page for this keyword. 

Do You Test Your Metadata & Schema in Search Results?

Let’s say your most visited landing page ranks on the first page for a specific keyword or group of keywords on Google, but on average it’s not in the first position yet. SEOmonitor provides information on what pages rich snippets are shown, which gives you an insight what to fix next.

Make a list of the keywords from position 1 to 10 and check their meta title and meta description. Are they descriptive, clickable enough to encourage users to click your link, or does the metadata leave you indifferent? If so, it’s time to test your landing page with new metadata – rewrite your meta title and description.

Tracking Your Success

In this case, the main goal of testing metadata is to increase the CTR for your search engine result. It could happen, for instance, that your search result afterwards gets more clicks and visitors than the competitor’s result with a lousy meta description.

Whether the experiment was a success or a failure, you can track this activity in SEOMonitor on the keyword level. When you want to test your schema data or in our case metadata, as you can see in the chart below, CTR progress is tracked with smart annotations that influenced CTR trends for a specific landing page.

The chart shows that performance in SERP is improving for the selected keyword and CTR for its landing page has risen to 10%, so we can confirm that CTR chart with smart annotations is a very helpful functionality for digital marketers, helping them easily correlate the impact.

You can also refer to the Historical changes tab, where you can see the impact of meta info changes and keep your tracking even more precise.

How to Measure the Impact of Tracked Keywords?

In the SEO Campaign dashboard you can track all of your keywords that already generate organic traffic to your website and also keywords that currently don’t generate traffic. Normally digital marketers spend most of their time in this second dashboard.

It is also reasonable to focus on tracking keywords for which your business does not yet rank well, let’s say lower than on the first page. All newly-discovered or imported keywords can be arranged in separate keyword groups.

The tool itself creates smart groups where you can track the keywords on the 1st and 2nd page.

From these groups you can decide your future focus on keywords. You can start with on-site SEO activities for keywords with the highest search volume that rank on the first page, while the next criteria might be the highest volume keywords from the 2nd page with a low SEO difficulty indicator and a high opportunity score.

The best part of this dashboard is the core SEO performance metric, i.e. the Visibility Score. This metric is the calculation of overall visibility in a search engine for a selected group of keywords. The majority of clicks come from 1st and 2nd page, which means when keywords advance to 2nd page, they are considered in visibility score. 

Picture below shows one-year growth of keywords located on the 1st page. The main goal of this campaign was to increase visibility score, which has risen for 5 %.

Inside SEO campaign dashboard you can also track:

• website ranking for SERP features whether your website is listed or not,
• warnings with detailed historical technical issues,
• content issues that might have influenced your keyword position because of the cannibalization problem (if landing page had changed several times in the specific time period),
• detailed information on the keyword level.

The very best moment for every SEO marketer is when the keyword attains the best rank position of all time, marked with a star. In our case, the competitor from a household and computers business acquired the best position with a keyword related to furniture. 

Among 594 non-branded keywords that we checked, the list above shows the top 10 keywords. There is a keyword with an average of 2,900 monthly searches and 8,000+ monthly searches in its peak season.

If you want to compare your visibility score with competition you can do that in Competition insights tab, where comparison is possible with up to 100 domains.

Which Backlinks Work Best for Your Business?

Another feature we found useful for tracking off-site SEO success is measuring your backlinks’ impact in the Content Performance dashboard.

The most important backlinks’ impact on your business is that they increase the visibility of your website in the search engine. Backlinks have an impact on referral traffic and those links also help create awareness through social media.

So, it’s up to you to decide whether or not it’s important where you place your content on the web, what anchor you use for a backlink, and which keywords you use in the outreach content.

Helpful Indicators When Tracking Backlink Performance and Their Impact on the Visibility of the Landing Page

As you can see below, there are numerous performance indicators available for each article. Visits, conversions and transactions data is pulled from Google Analytics. In the Content Performance dashboard, you can also see the impact that specific backlink might have on the visibility of the landing page. So, no more wasting time with backlinks that have no impact on your website. How about that?

Search engine optimization nowadays play a very important role in digital marketing activities. A good plan and execution of SEO can provide great business benefits.

Here are some of our tips & tricks:

– Firstly, focus on the topics and keywords that will have the most impact on your business.

– If selected keywords have high difficulty, start optimizing long-tail keywords first then continue with short-tails.

– Include the tweaking and generating of content in your monthly activities.

– Increase the trust index of your website by promoting it through your winning content.

– Compare your landing pages with competition to get new ideas on how to improve them.  

– Use easy win opportunities.

– Tweak content and create backlinks to landing pages that are on the second page of Google to quickly move them to the first page

SEOmonitor enables you to quickly and accurately define the optimization status of your website and helps you with strategical planning and upcoming SEO activities.