3 Ways to Gauge Your Website’s Success (Other Than Its Ranking)

Business owners are often preoccupied with the idea of getting their website to the top of Google's search results. “I want my site to be the very first search result,” is often what new clients tell us when we ask about their marketing goals. It’s easy to understand why; traffic to highly ranked sites is vastly superior to those appearing further down the list of results.

A study by FirstPageSage found that the top search result gets nearly 40% of the clicks - that's almost half!

And because the top result gets nearly half the clicks, your website's performance is often judged solely by how highly it's ranked on Google. In reality, this is not always the best way to measure your website's success or your marketing ROI. There are other metrics that can tell you plenty about the success of your website's performance outside of your Google ranking.

There are many factors that play into being the number one result on Google, including paid ads, website authority, location, and keywords. While these strategies are absolutely worthwhile to help you get to the top spot , they either cost money or a significant amount of time. And even after investing in one or more of these tactics, you aren’t guaranteed a number one ranking.

When it comes to determining the success of your website, there are other ways you can measure your site’s growth. Don't be confused - We aren't suggesting paid ads or SEO won’t help you work toward the first page of Google, because they absolutely can. However, there are other meaningful measurements you should be monitoring.

Traffic is a major factor in determining how successful your website is. After all, you won’t make it to that number one spot if no one is coming to your website in the first place. Google Analytics provides a lot of insight into the overall health of your site by giving you more meaningful stats like:

• Search queries
  
• Bounce rate
  
• Time on site
  
• Month to month patterns
  
• Year over year patterns

You’ll want to track both the amount and quality of traffic coming to your site. It’s better to be in a lower spot and have a decent amount of high-quality leads coming to your site than be in the top spot and not get clicks because you’re not what the searcher was looking for. And the more high-quality traffic your site gets, the more likely those leads will turn into conversions.

Conversions are the people who come to your website and turn into leads. They’re the visitors who convert to customers by calling or emailing you after visiting your site. When it comes to your conversions, ask yourself a few questions:

• Are you getting enough conversions?
  
• Are your leads high quality?
  
• Are they skewed toward one specific service or is there an even distribution of demand?

To get accurate answers to these questions will probably require tracking (which you should be doing anyway if you hope to increase your Google ranking.) If you’re not getting enough conversions, they aren’t high quality, or they’re skewed too much toward one particular service, that’s a good indication that your website could use some work. Focus your attention on editing content, adding keywords or better defining the locations you serve.

Cost per acquisition (CPA) requires tracking to know how many leads - calls and emails - you’ve received as a result of your online marketing efforts. Your CPA tells you how much you’ve spent on marketing for each lead you get.

There's an easy formula you can use to calculate your CPA: Simply divide your total marketing spend by the number of leads you received. The result is your cost per acquisition.

We normally recommend keeping CPA under $45 for small businesses, but depending on your industry, you might be willing to spend more or less on a quality lead. If your CPA is high, you’ll want to make adjustments to your campaign. If your CPA is low, keep doing what you’re doing and your online authority - as well as business - will continue to grow.

Although rankings do help overall visibility, it’s hard to get to that number one spot. In reality, rankings are just a small portion of overall success and these other measurements can give you more helpful insight as to how your website is helping your return on investment.

It’s more important to keep your site’s relevancy up and continue to monitor traffic, conversions and cost per acquisition than worry about beating out all other websites for that coveted top spot. Whether you’re ranked first or last, these three factors are still important to a healthy website.