How much Organic Traffic do you get?

The basic metric to track your local SEO progress is through the organic traffic you’re getting.

Has your traffic increased?

If it has, then by how much?

These simple questions are enough to give you an idea as to how you can measure your progress in this regard. Remember, your organic traffic might increase or decrease because of a number of reasons. For example, if you own a toy shop and Christmas is arriving, then you’ll certainly see a spike in your traffic.

Ideally, you’ll want the average organic traffic of your website to increase periodically. The determined period could be a year, quarter or month, depending on your local SEO efforts and goals. You can find out your website’s organic traffic on your Google Analytics account under the Channels option.

How is your Conversion Rate?

There must be a goal of attracting local traffic. Whether it’s to increase your customers or raise awareness, it’s essential that you have a certain goal in mind for your website. In most cases, it is to build the email list and/or increase the number of online customers (those who buy your products or service online). You can evaluate your progress in this regard by checking the conversion rate.

What is the conversion rate?

The rate of people performing the task you want them to is termed as conversion rate. Have clear goals regarding your conversion rate. Maybe you want to increase it by 0.5%? Or, maybe you want to increase the overall traffic to your website? By measuring this information, you can evaluate the progress of your local SEO campaign.

How much Traffic does your Mobile Site get?

Your mobile site is different from your desktop site. You should measure the progress of both of them. According to a survey, 50% of local mobile searchers visited the store within a day of performing the search. For desktop users, this percentage was 34%.

You can understand how valuable mobile traffic could be. It is estimated that around 50% of the online traffic will be on mobile by 2020.

That’s why it’s vital that you check the SEO progress of your mobile site. You can check its SEO progress using Google Analytics. Visit your Google Analytics page and in the drop-down menu, select Mobile> Overview.

This will show you the SEO stats of your mobile site. As Google has begun mobile-first indexing, you should treat your mobile site carefully and put effort into its search engine optimization.

How many Backlinks do you have? And how is their Quality?

The backlink profile of a website can easily throw light on its SEO progress. How many backlinks your business’s website has and how authoritative they are? Both of these are important questions, whose answer will throw light on the SEO progress of your site. If your number of backlinks isn’t increasing, you’ll begin to lag behind your competitors. That’s why you should regularly put effort into building backlinks and follow link-building strategies. This way, you’ll get ahead and stay ahead of your competition.

How much Referral Traffic does your site get?

Your organic traffic is another metric and your referral traffic is another.

What is referral traffic?

When you get traffic from another website and not from organic search, it’s called referral traffic. The referring website could be a social media platform or Google Maps, etc. You should keep a track of the referral traffic and if you see a drop in it, focus on optimizing your presence there. Referrals are a great way to enhance your local traffic. You wouldn’t want to miss out on these.

What is your SERP Ranking?

Check the ranking of your website for the keywords you were targeting. How high do you rank now? How high did you rank before?

It doesn’t require a tool or any paid service. Search for your business or the targeted keywords in private mode and you’ll see organic results.

Without using the private mode, your browser will show you results on the basis of your search history. This means you’ll not get honest results in a normal search.

Moz offers the facility of tracking keywords for your business. It will notify you on a weekly basis about your website’s performance in this regard.

Measuring your progress through SERP rankings is clearly the most direct way of tracking your local SEO progress.

How is your Offline Marketing Performing?

To check the impact of your offline marketing efforts on your website, you can set up tracking URLs for them which consist of UTM parameters.

UTM refers the campaign, its source and the medium. When someone comes at your website from a location, you can find out what location was it.

The best tool to use in this regard is Google’s Campaign URL Builder. It is fast and easy to use. You can find out more about using this tool in this guide.

Summary

By regularly checking local SEO progress, you can create better strategies for the future. You’ll also be able to compare your progress with your competitors and see who is faring better.

In the next chapter, we’ll summarize all that you’ve learnt in this local SEO guide.