Here are seven essential SEO metrics that can help you keep track of your overall SEO strategy.
1. Organic Traffic
If you’ve invested in building an SEO strategy, one of the first questions you likely have is if people are actually visiting your website. And if so, how are they finding it? Organic traffic analytics can give you answers to these questions. You can use Google Analytics as a free tool, but SEO software, such as Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush, can provide more specialized information.
Once you connect Google Analytics to your website, you’ll be able to see general information about your website visitors, where they are coming from (search engines, social media, direct, etc.), their general location, how long they stay on your website, which pages are the most popular and more. All of this is valuable information to track as it can give you a better understanding of how to improve your website. If your intention is for people to click “shop,” but your store is your least viewed page, you may need to think about the design of your website and how to make the shop more visible, for example.
2. Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings indicate how well your target keywords are performing on search engines. You can use SEO-specific software such as Ahrefs or Semrush to track this information. This will help you determine whether you need to target different keywords, add long-tail keywords or adjust your overall SEO strategy.
3. Page Load Speed
Have you ever visited a website only to leave a few seconds later when the page failed to load fast enough? Page load speed can have a huge impact on whether or not visitors end up staying on your website. But it also impacts how well you rank in search engines. Though the algorithm is constantly changing, websites with faster page upload speeds will be favored over slower ones. You can use PageSpeed Insights to find out how quickly your website is loading. If you do find it’s slow, there are several steps you can take to make it faster. Compressing images and making sure images are in the right format are two examples.
4. Bounce Rate
Another metric you’ll want to consider is bounce rate, or the number of people who enter your website only to leave after viewing only one page. While there will always be some visitors who bounce after they find what they are looking for on the first page, a high bounce rate might mean that the keywords directing people to your website and your content are mismatched. It may also mean that your website is hard to navigate or is slow to load. If you find that a specific page has a high bounce rate, you can look into what further information visitors might be interested in and find a way to incorporate that into the webpage. For example, if the page is a blog article, you might include a “read more” section at the end of the article.
5. Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites that go to your website. The more websites that link to yours, the more this tells search engines that your website is valuable and will push it up in rankings. You can actively build backlinks by reaching out to other websites, or you can do this organically by creating great content in hopes that more websites will start linking to yours.
It’s more important to have quality backlinks than a specific number. So instead of trying to get any website to link to yours to have one more backlink, think more about which websites would make sense to feature your website. Linking to other websites can also help with this, as other websites likely track their backlinks and will see when you link to theirs.
6. Content Engagement
You’ll want to look at how visitors interact with your website. How long do they spend on each page? Which pages are the most popular? Which is the last page visitors typically click on before leaving the website? Tools such as Google Analytics can provide insights about content engagement.
7. Conversion Rate
All of the metrics listed above are helpful to understand if your SEO strategy is working, but at the end of the day, your end goal is likely a specific call to action (CTA) you want visitors to take when they visit your website, whether that be to purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter or download a specific piece of content. That’s why it’s important to track your conversation rate. This will tell you how many people are actually taking the actions you want them to take.
In other words, if you have thousands of visitors to your website per month, but none of them are buying your product, you may need to reconsider your overall SEO strategy to find out why. Are you attracting the wrong type of customers? Is there a technical issue with the website? Is there a keyword and subject matter mismatch? The conversion rate will tell you if you’re on the right track regarding how your business goals meet your SEO efforts.
