A good article on fox-business about whether your business uses warning lights or gauges to understand how your business is growing. The proper answer should be: gauges.

A light is just either on or off, a gauge gives you much more information about where your business is headed, and in what condition. The article goes on to discuss different types of gauges and lights. The Growth gauge, for instance, lets you know exactly how much capital you have to grow in a successful way. The light for capital is simply either on or off and does not give you any information outside of itself.

We believe the same type of gauge/light metaphor can be applied to your SEO. Growth happens incrementally and relative to many other factors/gauges (think the MPH and the RPM relationship). A vague blinking light won’t tell you much about your SEO – you need to know much more information. Who are your visitors, what are their habits, how to they use your website; not simply are they there or are they not.

A SEO gauge will let you know if the actions you’re taking are giving you the results you need to climb to the next level. Luckily for us there are actually gauges we can use, it’s called Google analytics. GA provides us with a wealth of information about how our businesses are performing online. Not simply numbers it is deep insight into the behavior of your users and how they react to the changes you make. As long as you know how to read them, gauges give you the data – traffic, page views, bounce rate, demographics, and a host of other data points are part of what we need to qualify the changes we made or need to make for our websites.

Gauges provide us with details, context if you will. Lights (in the car business they’re called idiot lights) are static indicators, good for maybe cluing you in to the occasional fire, or telling you your engine needs to be checked as you coast into the emergency lane.