Measuring SEO Success: Key Metrics to Track

What SEO metrics are important?

According to the old saying, If you don’t take the time to measure it, you won’t be able to manage it. You need to implement a thorough tracking system to find opportunities to boost your organic search traffic or revenue. However, your digital marketing alerts could miss potential dangers to your current traffic and your business. Furthermore, there are plenty of metrics that are relevant to SEO that evaluate broader marketing performance.

SEO changes constantly

It is constantly evolving, and Google continuously changes its algorithm. In this regard, it is essential to continuously monitor important SEO metrics to ensure that your website is in good health and properly optimized and, yielding business benefits.

Start with the goal in your mind.

Although it’s normal to have many objectives (both micro and macro), establishing a specific primary goal is crucial.

The only method to determine the primary purpose should be to provide a solid knowledge of the website’s objectives and customer needs. A good client survey is useful in directing your efforts and shows that you truly care.

Client question examples:

• Please provide us with an outline of your business.

• What is the financial value of a newly certified lead?

• What are your most lucrative products and services (in the order)?

Remember these tips in mind when you are deciding on the website’s primary objective, along with any other goals and benchmarks:

Tips for setting goals

Measurable: If you can’t monitor it, you cannot improve it.

Be precise. Don’t let ambiguous market jargon muddy your objectives.

Set goals and share them with others; study after study has proven that writing down the goals you want to achieve and sharing them with others increases your odds of reaching them.

Be aware of your client.

Ensuring you ask your customer the most pertinent questions is crucial to understanding their website goals. We’ve compiled a list of questions you can use to familiarize yourself with your customers below!

Download the entire list.

What does that word mean?

When it comes to industry-specific marketing jargon, Make sure you’re in the know with the SEO glossary that is for this chapter!

Measuring

Once you’ve established the primary goal, consider what additional metrics can assist your site to reach its ultimate target. Measuring other (applicable) benchmarks will help you keep an eye on the health of your site and its progress.

Engagement metrics

What are the actions of visitors after they have accessed your site? This is the question engagement metrics attempt to solve. Some of the most well-known metrics to measure how users take part in your content include:

Conversion rate

Conversion rate: The amount of time (for an individual goal or desired action) split by the total number of distinct visits. A conversion rate could be applied to any action, including email signups to purchase or create an account. Understanding your conversion rate will assist you in determining the ROI in investments your site’s traffic can bring.

Time on the page

How long did visitors spend on your site? If you’re writing an article 2,000 words long and viewers spend around 10 seconds, the content will likely be read (unless you’re a super-speed reader). But if a URL has a slow duration on its page, that’s not necessarily a problem. Think about the intention behind the page. 

Pages per visit

What was the purpose of your site? Keeping visitors entertained and leading them to a higher level? The number of pages per visit could be an important engagement metric. If your page is independent of your website’s other web pages (e.g., visitors came to your site, obtained what they wanted, and then left), then pages with low numbers per visit can be considered acceptable.

Rate of bounce

“Bounced” sessions indicate that users visited your site but left the site without exploring the site further. Many people attempt to reduce this number since they believe it is tied to the quality of the website; however, it needs to be more about the user’s experience. We’ve seen instances where bounce rates have increased for restaurant websites that have been redesigned and improved more than ever. 

The investigation revealed that the users came to look up menus, business hours, or an address before bouncing off to visit the location in real life. The best way to judge the quality of a page or website is the depth of scrolling.

Scroll depth

This is how long people scroll on individual websites. Are they able to access your most important information? If you still need to, you should test various methods of providing the most important content on your site, including contact forms, multimedia, and others. 

Also, consider whether your website’s content is of high quality. Are you avoiding unnecessary words? Does it make it appealing to visitors to stay on the page? Tracking scroll depth is enabled within Google Analytics. Google Analytics.

Within Google Analytics, you can create goals to determine the success of your site in achieving its goals. If the goal of a page is filling out a form, then you can set that as the goal. When visitors have completed this task, you’ll observe the result within your reporting.

Traffic from search engines

The ranking is an important SEO metric, but assessing the performance of your website’s organic traffic continues beyond that. The aim of appearing in the search results is to be viewed by users as the solution to their question. If you’re ranked, but no traffic is coming in, there’s a problem.

How do you determine the amount of traffic your site receives from Google? One of the most accurate methods to determine this is through Google Analytics.

Utilizing Google Analytics to uncover traffic information

Google Analytics (GA) is full of information, and it can become difficult to navigate if you need to know which data to search for. This isn’t an exhaustive list; however, it is a basic overview of some information about traffic from this tool for free.

Separate organic traffic

GA lets you view the traffic coming to your website through channels. This can help reduce fears due to changes in another channel (e.g., traffic to your site dropped because a paid advertising campaign was stopped, but organic traffic remained constant).

Your site’s traffic over time

GA allows you to view total sessions/users/pageviews to your site over a specified date range and compare two separate ranges.

How many times a page has received

Site Content reports from GA are a great way to evaluate how well a certain website — for instance, the number of unique visitors they have received within a specific time frame.

The traffic from a specific campaign

You can utilize UTM (urchin monitoring module) codes to increase the recognition. Choose the medium, source, and campaign, then add the UTM codes at your links at the beginning. If people click on the UTM-code links you provided, this data will be added to the GA’s “campaigns” report.

Rate of click-through (CTR)

CTR is the percentage of views compared to clicks. In the context of SEO CTR, it will tell the percentage of views from the Google SERP that resulted in the click-through to your website page. If 100 people view your page in the search results and only one clicks on it, you’ve got an average CTR of 1.1%. Similar to impressions, you can also monitor CTR directly within the Google search console’s “Performance” module.

There’s a strong correlation between the rank place and CTR. The higher your ranking on average, the more clicks you’ll receive. While the first page on Google receives 90% of clicks on a query, most traffic is generated in the top Google positions.

Here are some tips to increase your CTR on specific pages:

• The title of your page should be in line with the search intention.
• Include a convincing CTA in your headline If you can.
• Make use of brackets, dashes, or pipes to help your title stand out.
• Write meta descriptions that will entice readers to click and go on to read.
• Inspire an emotional response with your meta description and title.
• Tell them what they’ll leave with when they visit your page.
• Utilize structured information to improve how your site appears when searching for it.
• Use descriptive URLs that are short with the primary keyword.

Keyword rankings

Keyword rankings are a clear, important SEO metric to monitor. They allow you to measure your progress and give you a sign early to show that the SEO strategy is effective. Additionally, rankings give you an overview of the current market share of your organic SEO and the overall possibility.

When conducting keyword research, be sure to focus on both non-branded and branded search keywords. Branded keywords are essential as they signify customers who are willing to buy. They are also crucial to your online image. In contrast, non-branded terms for online products, such as “women’s running shoes,” are important for helping customers to make the decision-making phase of your customer’s journey.

Author Bio

Shahzad Ahmad Mirza specializes in blogging and digital marketing. He also can teach programming. His blog posts cover topics like SEO, optimizing social media for marketing, and applying technology to marketing. A different specialization, entrepreneurs working in the business sector, are also available. In addition, he’s the director and co-founder in the operations of designvalley.com and gbober.com, which manage personal public relations.

He is passionate about sharing information via websites as he enjoys research. He offers top-quality educational content to online users. Through his diverse experiences, he aims to bring about change. His profession aims to share his experiences with other people.