If you’re a local business, measuring your local online visibility regularly is a good business practice as you’ll be able to see the impact of any online marketing or advertising efforts. This helps you manage the effectiveness of spending money to increase online visibility. If these 5 metrics are not trending up and to the right over time, you should consider re-evaluating your marketing strategy.
The 5 essential metrics that measure local online visibility are:
- Unique visitors
- Time on site
- Number of conversions
- Social media engagement
- Number of reviews
Unique Visitors are a count of how many unique people visit your website in a given period. While the total number gives you a sense of overall activity, segmenting this number by traffic source allows you to more specifically identify any marketing effort that had a positive impact. Traffic sources that you should focus on are: direct, search, referring, social media, and email.
Direct – number of people who go directly to your website by typing in your website address in their browser
Search – number of people who find your website through either paid or natural search results
Referring – number of people who arrive at your website from other sites that link to yours
Social media – number of people who visit your site from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn where you can post status updates
Email – number of people who go to your site through a link they receive in an email
Any changes in one of these traffic sources can usually be attributed to a specific marketing effort.
Time on Site measures how long someone remains on your website. It’s an indicator of how engaged visitors are on your site. A higher time on site shows that people are reading your content and browsing different pages and blog postings.
Number of Conversions show how many people are converting from a visitor to a lead typically through a conversion process where they submit their contact information in exchange for a valuable download. The download can be an ebook, template, calculator, or widget that helps your website visitors better define their specific problem.
Social Media Engagement is a form of conversion that represents less commitment from website visitors, but still indicates interest. They may like, retweet, or share a particular blog posting which also helps with distribution of your message. In addition, they may begin following your business on Facebook or Twitter which indicates a higher level of engagement since any future updates you make on those networks can now be seen by them.
Reviews are the social proof that people use to make decisions to visit a website in the first place. Similar to choosing a crowded restaurant over an empty one, those businesses with more online reviews often get more visibility in local search, and frequently, receive more visitors than those websites with no reviews.
You can increase the number of reviews you receive on sites like Yelp by asking your customers to give you a positive review, if they had a positive experience that’s worth sharing. Make it easy for your customers to give you reviews by including links to review sites on your website. Then, you can be precise in your instructions when you ask someone to give you a review because you can send them to your website and have them click on the appropriate link.
Are there other metrics you use to measure local online visibility?
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Free Online Visibility Self-Assessment
Do you need help assessing if you’re doing all you can to maximize your business’ online visibility?
If you want to know what to look for, here is a free self-assessment that will help you review your online visibility so you have all the pieces in place to maximize getting found and contacted by your prospects.
