As a digital marketer, you can measure the success of your work in several ways, but examining key SEO metrics is one of the most important.
Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that give you simple to read reports so you can track those metrics. Google Search Console and Google Analytics are two of the best ones and they’re offered for free. You can get most of the metrics you need to focus on from either one of those tools.
There are 12 metrics that are more important than others to track.
1. Organic traffic
Organic traffic is traffic that you get from appearing on the search engine results pages without paying for it.
The main point of SEO is to make your website show up in search results when people look up keywords related to your business.
Organic traffic refers to the number of people who visit your site as a result of your SEO strategy. It’s important to track your organic traffic so you can see how effective your SEO strategy is.
By landing page
Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your site without having been directed there through advertising. To determine where you need improvement, you need to track organic traffic by landing page, so you can see which pages on your site are getting the most organic traffic.
If some of your pages are ranking on page 1 while others are on page 7, you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on the latter.
If you compare the rankings of the pages you are using different SEO strategies for, you will get an idea of which strategies work best.
By location
It is important to track the source of your organic traffic. This is especially the case if your SEO efforts are targeting specific geographic locations or if you are planning to expand your business into new markets.
Organic traffic by country should be tracked first. A strong fan base may be discovered overseas. In this case, an update to the marketing strategy could include expansion into foreign markets.
If you’re getting a lot of traffic from countries that aren’t profitable for your business, you may want to look into why that is. You may need to adjust your SEO strategy to focus more on your target countries.
It is possible that your product or service appeals to people in some states more than others, even if the vast majority of your organic traffic comes from within the US. The only way you can know that is by tracking organic traffic by state.
You can improve sales by allocating more marketing resources to states where people have a favorable opinion of your brand. If states that are crucial to your business are not doing well, it may signify the need to adjust your website experience to better reach this demographic.
You should examine organic traffic by city to see if your brand appeals mostly to people in metropolitan areas.
It is advisable to invest your resources in areas where you are likely to experience the highest return on investment.
2. Organic bounce rate
The bounce rate tells you how many people “bounced” away from your site after only viewing one page. It is measured as a percentage of visitors, with a lower number being better.
If you see that you have a high bounce rate, it means that you should improve your website so that visitors will stay longer. For example, you could show links to related posts or other items of interest in the right-hand sidebar.
By landing page
It would be beneficial to look at the bounce rate in relation to specific landing pages. That way, you would be able to tell which pages are causing visitors to leave and which ones are keeping them engaged.
If a landing page has a high bounce rate, that is an indication that the visitor did not find what they were looking for.
3. Organic conversion rate
Organic traffic only gets people to your website, it doesn’t mean that the sale has been made. You need to measure the conversion rate as well to see how effective organic traffic has been.
You should check your organic traffic’s aggregate conversion rate to get an idea of how well you generally appeal to people who come to your site from the search results. However, you should also look at different segments to see what factors are influencing conversion rates.
By landing page
You may want to measure your conversion rate using your landing page as a metric. The reason for this is that conversions are usually determined by how effective the landing page is. If you find that one page has a significantly higher conversion rate than another, it could be because that page has a more effective marketing message.
By location
If you want to appeal to people in specific geographic areas, look at how well your messaging is doing in terms of converting organic traffic in those areas. If you find that it’s doing well, then increase your marketing budget for those regions.
By device
You will have a hard time gaining a significant portion of the market unless you design your website to be appealing to mobile audiences. You can see how effective your site is at engaging mobile users by looking at the conversion rate for organic traffic on different types of devices.
Checks should be made to see if conversions made by desktop users are higher than those made by smartphone or tablet users as this would suggest that the site is not optimised for mobile audiences. If this is the case, further tests should be run and the development team contacted in order to improve the mobile experience.
By browser
It’s important to test your site on as many browsers as possible. If everyone only used one browser, your job would be a lot easier. However, that is not the case and it is important to test your site on as many browsers as possible.
You need to check conversion rate by browser for organic traffic in order to determine which browsers are bringing you the most organic traffic.
If you find that a lot more people using one type of browser convert than people using other types of browsers, that usually means that your site isn’t very user-friendly for people using those other browsers. Talk to your development team and ask them to make sure that the site works well on all the most popular browsers.
I helped a client whose website wasn’t functioning on Samsung Galaxy phones. Once we fixed the problem, they began earning an additional $50,000 each month.
4. Top exit pages for organic traffic
Pages people visit before they leave your site are called exit pages. It’s important to track which ones are the most popular, because those pages might be where something is going wrong.
makes a bad web page and learn how to make yours better. Web pages that are not interesting to viewers cause them to go to other sites. Find out what makes a web page bad and how to make improvements.
5. Breakdown of organic traffic from Bing and Google
Other popular search engines include Bing and Google. Your customers likely use both to search the internet.
You should examine the organic traffic between the two search engines to get a better understanding.
If you’re not getting as much traffic from a search engine as you think you should, you should update your SEO strategy.
6. Keywords ranked in Google
A keyword tracking tool like SEMrush can be used to determine the number of keywords for which a site ranks in Google. Once the keywords are known, there are various ways to use the data to improve an SEO strategy.
Make a list of the keywords you want to rank for but currently don’t. These are the keywords you should focus on in your SEO campaigns.
If your site is ranking in the top 10 for some high-converting keywords, it’s a good idea to keep using those keywords in your content marketing campaigns. Your top-ranking keywords are bringing you the most traffic, so make sure that the landing pages associated with those keywords are relevant to keep your bounce rate low.
7. Local visibility
It’s very important that you keep track of your local visibility if your business has one or more physical locations that customers can visit directly.
Do a search on Google for your niche and your town or city. See if your site appears in the top three results. If it doesn’t, work on some local SEO.
8. Click-through rate (CTR)
The average percentage of people who click on one of your links after seeing it in the search results is called the click-through rate (CTR).
If people like the content they see when they search for it, they will click on the link. If not, they will move on to another result.
By landing page
You can examine your website’s CTR by landing page to see which pages are getting the most attention from the search results. This will help you determine which pages are generating the most revenue from an SEO perspective.
The pages with the lowest CTRs should also be optimized.
By top keywords
Check the CTR of your top search terms in Google Search Console to see if any of them are getting a lot of clicks. If they are, determine which pages are ranking for those keywords and make sure the page content accurately reflects searcher intent. Also, test conversion optimization elements on these pages.
CTR is short for Click-Through-Rate. If you observe a low CTR for a valuable search term, you should look at the page(s) optimized for that term and find out why. It might be that the title or description associated with the page isn’t relevant or enticing.
9. Pages indexed in Google Search Console
No one will be able to find your website unless it is indexed. Therefore, you need to make sure that a high number of your website’s pages are indexed.
If it takes a long time for your pages to get indexed, you can submit them manually using the Crawl>Fetch as Google option in the Search Console.
10. Pages crawled per day
Google Search Console will tell you how many pages have been crawled in the last 90 days.
A small percentage of your pages being crawled could be an indication of a problem with your crawl budget. If it looks like Google’s bot will use up too many of your system resources, it won’t crawl your entire site.
SEO KPIs You Need to Track
There are things you can do to make visitors stay on your website longer.
1. ROI
Search engine optimization is a long-term marketing strategy. Most businesses’ ultimate goal for their SEO strategy is to increase their return on investment. This can be done by investing in an in-house team or hiring an agency. Search engine optimization is a long-term marketing strategy.
2. Conversions (Sales and Leads)
Many businesses work to get a financial return, but it takes time to see the results of that. So ROI shouldn’t be the only thing you rely on.
An increase in organic conversions can be easily attributed to your efforts.
3. Organic Visibility
There are two ways you can measure and report on organic visibility, which is a solid KPI that shows consistent growth.
4. Organic Sessions
If you increase the number of times your content is seen, you should also see an increase in the number of times people click through to your site, and this is where you can start to show the benefits of your SEO strategy.
How will you know if your efforts are successful? One way to measure this is by looking at organic sessions (traffic).
5. Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic
The true impact of your efforts on organic traffic can be measured by the shift in the percentage split of non-branded traffic that your site is receiving.
6. Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings may not be as important as some of the other metrics, but they should still be tracked to see how your main target keywords are ranking.
If we look back five years ago, we see that most SEO campaigns were successful if they achieved high rankings.
7. Backlinks
Backlinks are still one of Google’s top ranking factors and there is no indication that this will change any time soon. It’s important to keep an eye on the health of your link profile, including any new links you are earning, as well as any problems with toxic links.
8. Organic CTR
Although CTR (click-through rate) is not a guaranteed way to improve your ranking, it is likely that if more people click on your listing, you will see an increase in traffic.
You should be monitoring both the individual pages on your site and the specific queries people are using to find your site.
9. Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate means that people are leaving your site quickly after landing on the page, which could be an indication that the content on the page isn’t relevant to what they were looking for.
10. Average Time on Page
The amount of time a user spends on a page is directly proportional to how engaged they are with the page. The more engaged a user is, the higher the chance they will take a desired action, such as making a purchase.
Follow your SEO metrics closely
There are a lot of SEO metrics and it is interesting how they work. The ones I mentioned are just the beginning.
As I spend more time working in digital marketing, I am learning more. I would suggest that you spend some time analyzing your data to see what is most helpful in measuring success in SEO.
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