May 26th, 2010 by Susie

This is a question that people may ask themselves daily, but when it comes to your website, links and keywords, it is important to differentiate between the two. Initially a company may be inclined to think that just because they have a high click through rate (CRT) or an increased amount of traffic to their site, that their web optimisation is working wonders and they are doing everything right. Granted, ask any SEO company and they will no doubt tell you that this is a good thing, however if only these elements are measured alone then you may not be getting the most accurate results from your website effectiveness.

Being popular is one thing, yet being interesting and attractive is another thing altogether and this is particularly important when looking at your website design. Whether you are employing your own SEO company or carrying out your own web optimisation, be sure to know the difference between appealing to your audience and just making yourself known. Of course, awareness of your company or brand is essential, but if it just stops there and does not develop into anything further, then your efforts could end up being wasted in the long run.

To put this into perspective, consider that you carry out some optimisation on your keywords or links which results in a higher ranking within search engine results pages (SERP’s). As your links and pages appear on the first page for example, more users are inclined to click through to your website. For a period of time, the increase in CRT will in turn encourage your page to maintain its high ranking. Whilst this is of course a positive result in terms of your website efficiency, to monitor its effectiveness you need to realise why your links are appearing high and if people clicking to your site are actually using your site, or returning.

Firstly you need to check that all your links and keywords are due to ethical search results. This is particularly important if you are using external search engine optimisation services, as you need to ensure no black hat techniques are being used to avoid being penalised by search engines. Black hat techniques may work for short term growth, but with the increased sophistication of search engines, they are likely to be picked up and eliminated at some point.

Next, check the bounce rate on your website. Bounce rate is not always a bad thing and every website will have some degree of bounce rate, however if the majority of visitors are just landing on your home page then clicking back out, it is likely to be due to the fact that they have realised your site cannot provide them with what they are looking for.

Lastly, you can use some research and SEO tools freely available online to tell you how many of our visitors are unique, which will give you an indication as to the number of repeat users to your site. If users return time and time again, then you are doing something right.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.