When you invest in various marketing efforts one of the hardest things to do is to check which process is working for you. This is especially held when you’re doing organic SEO because it can take months for SEO to kick in.
One of the reasons search engine optimization (SEO) is so effective is that everything can be tracked and measured. SEO metrics provide key insights into how your organic search strategy succeeds, whether you look at ranks, traffic, engagement, leads, orders, revenue, or authority.
Furthermore, SEO metrics are critical data points for developing new strategies or improving existing ones. But how do you decide which metrics to track? After all, thousands of data points are available through Google Analytics and SEO tools.
There are numerous ways that can be used to help rank higher. However, it is critical to monitor SEO data to ensure that what you are doing is effective.
Fortunately, there are numerous tools available that offer you easy-to-read statistics so you can double-check those data. Google Search Console and Google Analytics are two of the best utilities because they are not only free but also provide the majority of the information you need to focus on.
In this post, I’ll show you the 15 best SEO metrics to track plus the tools to monitor them.
- Organic traffic
Organic traffic is a crucial indicator for measuring SEO results. This is because this figure represents all of the views your site receives simply through organic search.
While overall traffic counts can provide insight into your site’s overall performance, focusing on organic traffic is a better approach to assessing the direct impact of your SEO strategy.
After all, improving your visibility in search for terms related to your brand and sector is one of the primary aims of any SEO plan, and it stands to reason that if you’re successful, the number of people you receive through search results should progressively increase.
And obtaining this data is simple with Google Analytics.
This report will show your site’s organic traffic for the previous month by default. You can view your overall number of sessions as well as how that number changed during the month.
You may also change the time window to gain a more detailed picture of your organic traffic performance over time and check if it reflects your SEO efforts.
And, as you refine your strategy, month-over-month and year-over-year reports are an excellent method to see the long-term impact your SEO has on your site. And obtaining this data is simple with Google Analytics.
- CTR
The percentage of searchers who visit your site after seeing one of your pages in search results is indicated by your CTR, or clickthrough rate. If ten distinct users saw one of your sites ranking in Google’s results for a specific search, but only one of them clicked and visited your site, your CTR would be 10%.
This score is one of the most accurate indications of how well your sites capture visitors’ attention in search results. As a result, it’s an excellent predictor of the quality of your site’s title tags and meta descriptions. After all, when one of your sites appears in search results, these are the elements that appear — and they are what searchers use to decide whether or not to visit that page.
If your clickthrough rates are low, it could mean that your title tags and meta descriptions need to be improved. However, it is equally critical to realise the function that rankings play in CTR.
After all, pages ranked first receive 31.52 percent of clicks on a desktop results page and 24.05 percent of hits on a mobile results page. As a result, the lower your site ranks in search, the lower your CTR should be. However, keeping an eye on this indicator is a useful method to track your progress over time. If it doesn’t rise, you know you’ve got some work to do.
- Bounce rate
A “bounce” occurs when a visitor lands on a page on your site and then leaves without proceeding to another page. The percentage of visitors that do so is referred to as your “bounce rate.”
It’s also a good measure of whether your site’s content matches what consumers expect when they select one of your pages from the list of search results.
If a big number of your visitors leave your site and select a different page from the results, this indicates that the page they’re arriving on doesn’t have the information they requested or needed.
However, if your bounce rate remains low, you can be confident that your search-ranking pages are providing what your visitors want — and that those pages are assisting you in meeting your SEO objectives.
- Keyword rankings
This statistic is rather straightforward.
As you attempt to improve your site’s ranks for keywords that are relevant to your business, it makes sense to keep track of how those rankings change. For some of your most critical terms, you may want to do this manually. After all, a quick Google search for those phrases will tell you exactly where you stand. However, you may receive a more detailed view of your rankings by using a programme like SEMrush. For example, if you open the Organic Search Positions report, you’ll obtain a summary of all the keywords and positions for which your site ranks.
Checking this report on a regular basis is a good approach to tracking ranking changes over time and measuring how your overall search exposure is increasing.
- Domain authority
One of the most significant goals of any SEO plan is to increase the site’s authority in the eyes of Google. While attempting to evaluate this influence purely on earned links would be nearly impossible, tools such as Website Authority Checker make the process straightforward. Enter your site’s domain name, and you’ll see a number in the range of one to 100 indicating the authority of your site based on your backlink profile.
Keeping an eye on this number is a simple approach to assessing the effectiveness of your link development plan and can help you see how your site’s trustworthiness increases over time.
- New backlinks and referring domains
In addition to analysing your site’s domain authority, you should also keep track of the number of incoming links and referring domains.
If you’re unfamiliar with this distinction, it’s critical to understand.
While your incoming link count covers all links heading to your site, your referring domains count reflects the number of distinct domains from which you have incoming links.
Although both metrics appear to be extremely similar, it is prudent to keep an eye on both. And, while any link has the potential to increase your authority, links from new domains almost always have a bigger impact than links from sites that already link to you.
Incorporating both of these figures into your reports may give you a more full picture of your link development results.
- Page speed
Page speed is a vital aspect of your site’s ability to rank highly and convert visitors into customers, and it is one of the most important factors in the experience your site gives. As you improve your site, keep an eye on whether your modifications affect your load times.
Fortunately, this is a simple measure to track with Google’s Page Speed Insights. It is entirely up to you the metrics you include in this report.
You can add your page load times in FCP and DCL if you prefer a more technical approach. However, if you are unfamiliar with these parameters, you can just use Google’s optimization score.
Monitoring these data, in either case, can enable you readily grasp this critical component of the user experience your site provides – and can help you discover any flaws before they impact your results.
- Conversions
The fact that this measure is last on our list does not imply that it is insignificant.
Because this measure indicates the impact of your SEO strategy on your company’s most essential goals, such as leads and sales, it’s perhaps the most significant for measuring your overall success. Setting up custom goals in Google Analytics is the easiest approach to getting this information.
You can set goals for online purchases, lead form submissions, email newsletter signups, and nearly any other action that is critical to your business.
Then, you can easily track the percentage of your visitors who take each of these steps, allowing your firm to make significant progress toward its objectives.
SEO Metrics Tools
There are numerous methods available for measuring the performance of your website. However, when it comes down to it, the following will provide you with all of the information you need to build useful SEO reports.
- Google Analytics
It should come as no surprise that Google Analytics, Google’s platform, is one of the greatest tools for analysing your SEO effectiveness.
This tool provides greater insight than almost any other existing tool. It’s also completely free.
It’s now considered a standard tool for site owners and marketers, so if you’re not already using it to measure the performance of your site, you should get started as soon as possible.
- Google Search Console
Another Google-owned tool for evaluating site performance is Search Console. However, unlike Analytics, which focuses on analysing on-site actions, Search Console is primarily intended to assist site owners in monitoring how their sites appear in search results.
It allows you to check which of your pages appear in search results, as well as the CTR for each page.
Apart from these free tools made available by Google, there are some excellent paid tools if you want to consider like SEMrush and Ahrefs.
How to Use Testing Tools to Improve Your SEO
The metrics listed above are some of the simplest ways to assess the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. While this makes them the most user-friendly, it’s critical that you don’t overlook the less obvious aspects of your site’s performance, specifically, user experience. Page speed measurements, for example, can provide you with a rough indication of the experience your site gives.
However, when it comes down to it, user testing is the only way to properly understand how visitors engage with your site. If you’re not familiar with user testing, it entails monitoring how visitors interact with individual pages on your website. This technique might assist you in identifying any usability concerns and learning more about why your users act the way they do.
While these reports demand a bit more study than simply reviewing a few numbers data, they can provide a more in-depth picture of your visitors.
And, given that the ultimate purpose of attracting visitors to your website is to convert them into customers, this understanding is critical for achieving the desired results.
Summing-up
Measuring your outcomes is an important aspect of search engine optimization. It’s how you know if your plan is working, what types of outcomes you’re getting, and where you may improve in the future. It’s time to get started measuring SEO metrics like organic traffic, CTR, bounce rate, keyword ranks, domain authority, backlinks, and conversions if you haven’t already. Fortunately, tools like Google Analytics and Search Console make this process pretty simple. So, if you’re ready to gain a more realistic picture of how your SEO efforts are affecting your business, spend some time evaluating which indicators are most relevant for your objectives – and you might be surprised by the results.
Shergroup’s digital marketing team has years of experience and can fast-track your organic growth by optimising your website’s SEO and opening doors for more perpetual traffic. We have designed some very cool marketing packages for you. You can get in touch with our business solutions advisors who can help you with details on our digital marketing packages. The package that best meets your requirements you can go ahead with that.
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