As a digital marketer, there are several ways to measure the performance of your marketing efforts. Take a look at critical SEO metrics to gain insight.
Luckily, there are numerous tools that you can use to get clear and understandable reports so you can inspect those metrics. Google Search Console and Google Analytics are two great free utilities which can supply the majority of metrics required to concentrate on.
But which metrics are the most important to track? Here are 12 that stand out from the pack.
1. Organic traffic
Organic traffic refers to the visitors coming to your website as a result of appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) without needing to pay for advertisement.
That’s the essence of SEO, after all. You desire your website to be positioned high in searches associated with your field.
It is essential to monitor your total organic traffic to be able to observe how many individuals are checking out your website due to your SEO approach.
By landing page
Overall organic traffic is sitewide. You should also keep an eye on the organic traffic based on the page people arrive at. Why? This is how you can find out what you need to work on.
If you discover that some pages are at the top of the search engine results while other pages are buried deep into page 7, then it’s obvious that you should focus your SEO endeavours on the ones with a lower ranking.
Furthermore, by deploying distinct SEO approaches for various pages, you can evaluate which approaches perform best when you compare their rankings.
By location
It is essential to keep tabs on the source of your organic visitors. It is particularly the situation if you are looking to zero in on particular geographic regions through your SEO campaigns, or if you are aspiring to grow your business into fresh areas.
First, you should track organic traffic by country. You could be astonished to discover that you have a devoted group of admirers in foreign countries. It could be advisable to modify your advertising tactics to involve widening your range into these new territories if that is true.
If there is a lot of organic traffic coming from nations that are not good for your business, it could be a good idea to investigate the cause. You may have to modify your SEO approach to concentrate more on the regions you are aiming for.
Although most organic visitors to your website come from within the United States, it is conceivable that certain states may have a greater affinity for your product or service than others. The only way to determined that is to keep an eye on the number of visitors coming from each particular state.
If you notice that clients in certain states favor your product more than those residing in another area, then you should concentrate more of your advertising efforts in those areas in order to boost sales. If significant states to your organization don’t seem to be fruitful, that can indicate that you require to adjust your website experience to more accurately cater to this demographic.
Digging even deeper, it could be possible that your brand resonates with people who live in cities. It is advantageous to take a closer look at organic site visits based on geographic location.
Put your resources towards the area with the highest return on investment.
2. Organic bounce rate
The bounce rate reveals how many visitors left your site after only viewing one page. The metric is expressed as a proportion of people visiting, and the lower the figure, the more preferable it is.
If your bounce rate is high, it could be an indication that you need to make some adjustments on your website to keep people engaged.
How is bounce rate calculated?
Bounce rate is calculated using the following formula:
The rate of people leaving a website after only viewing one page is calculated by dividing the number of these kinds of sessions by the total amount of website visits.
If you have 15,000 visits to your website, with 5,700 of them only consisting of one page being viewed. In this situation, you would have a bounce rate of .38, or 38%, which is equal to 5,700 divided by 15,000.
By landing page
It would be prudent to analyze the amount of visitors leaving a webpage immediately after arriving (bounce rate) by landing page. By doing that, you will be able to identify which landing pages repel visitors and which ones make them stay longer.
If a landing page has a large percentage of visitors leaving immediately, it could imply that what was presented was not relevant to the terms the individual typed into their search engine. The individual may have located what was required quickly and gone away, so caution should be taken.
3. Organic conversion rate
Keep in mind that getting organic visitors to your website does not guarantee that you have made a sale. You should take the time to calculate the conversion rate too.
You should examine the overall conversion rate for visitors who accessed your website through organic means. This will provide you with a good indication of how attractive your site is to visitors coming through a search engine. You will also want to look into individual subsections to analyze which factors are influencing conversion rates.
By landing page
You may want to calculate the rate of conversion based on the page that is initially loaded up. Why? Conversions are typically determined based on the content on the page. If you observe that one page produces more positive outcomes than another, it could signify that one page is not as convincing of a marketing message.
By location
Examine organic conversions based on geographical positions and you may discover that your communication techniques are attractive to individuals in certain areas. If your message is well-received by audiences in one or more places, then it would be wise to invest more money in advertising in those areas, in accordance with the fundamentals of business.
By device
It is virtually impossible to gain a substantial portion of a market without catering to people who use mobile devices. To determine how effective your website is at luring in mobile users, you must measure the rate of conversion from organic search traffic coming from those devices.
If you observe that conversions from desktop users are significantly more than converter from smartphone and tablet users, it is likely that your website has not been tailored to suit mobile users. Carry out a few experiments and reach out to your development team to enhance the mobile experience.
4. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The search click-through rate is determined by taking the total amount of users that clicked on a page in the organic search results and dividing it by the amount of impressions for that page.
CTR is much more crucial than your placement in the Google rankings. What is the use of having a high position in searches for a specific word if nobody is accessing your website?
Unless you have an understanding of the expected standards, the Click Through Rate is just another statistic. You need context to see how you’re tracking.
5. Backlinks and referring domains
We know what you’re thinking – why measure links? Surely there are more important SEO metrics to track?
Take this into account: you are already aware of how vital links are for SEO. Google assesses the number and quality of backlinks to decide if your website can be viewed as a dependable source and advantageous to searchers. The better your backlinks are in terms of quality and relevance, the more likely it is that your website will appear among the top search results and achieve a high domain authority.
Hence, it is logical for you to monitor links as a measurement.
But you can’t just track the number of backlinks.
Google does not determine your position in search results based on the amount of links pointing to your website.
You need to track the quality of backlinks.
If you have a lot of links, there is not enough time to inspect each one to make sure it is useful and of good quality.
So, use these tools to help:
- Google Search Console
- SEMrush
- Moz’s Link Explorer
- Ahrefs
Ahrefs can be particularly advantageous, since it enables you to review the circulation of the URL rating – the amount of backlinks that are of high-quality compared to the amount of low-quality ones.
6. Dwell time
The period of time a person stays on a webpage after they have been directed there from search engine results is referred to as dwell time.
This metric from SEO helps to judge how successful the content is in responding to an individual’s query.
Contemplate this: The more seconds you devote to absorbing what is on a page, the greater the likelihood that page met your requirements.
7. Average time on page
The measure of average time on page is the length of period a website user spends viewing a single page before heading to another destination.
This material can be very enlightening in relation to your content.
The title might be causing people to misinterpret it, leading to them exiting the page quickly. The material isn’t good enough for individuals to dedicate a great deal of time to it.
Simultaneously, a below-average amount of time spent on the page isn’t necessarily a cause for alarm. Few individuals spend much time on your Contact Us page, indicative of the fact that likely you have not included the necessary contact data.
Check the average amount of time visitors spend on your page by going to Google Analytics.
8. Pages per visit
At times, the aim of your website is to instantly turn visitors into customers. You want them to complete a form, ask a question, or buy something immediately.
At times, the objective is to hook people in and lead them to different websites, ultimately progressing their progress through the sales process. This is especially valuable for eCommerce and service-based businesses.
The more of your website that people explore, the higher the chance that they will make a purchase.
Pages per visit is one of the engagement metrics that is becoming increasingly more vital in assessing your ranking on search engines, in addition to bounce rate and the amount of time spent on a page.
The speculation is that the longer users are on your website, the more they enjoy your content.
It is plausible that website visitors could be struggling to locate the information they require. Nevertheless, exploring other fundamental search engine optimization statistics should allow you to understand the overall condition.
9. Pages indexed
Many times, people overlook the indication of indexing status as it pertains to SEO, yet it can be incredibly useful for revealing how search bots and web crawlers are accessing one’s website.
Head over to Google Search Console and find the tab labeled “Google Index,” and then scroll down to “Index Status.”
This reveals which websites the Googlebot attempted to include in its index.
Examine your webpages to figure out if anything is hindering them from appearing in the Search Engine Results Pages.
Have you observed any rapid decreases or abrupt rises in indexed pages? Look into them.
10. Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
The success of your SEO campaigns is largely dependent upon both page speed and Core Web Vitals. The state of your website and the satisfaction of people visiting it are both highly connected to these SEO metrics.
Let’s start with the first one: Core Web Vitals.
What are the Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are fresh metrics that gauge how users perceive the velocity, responsiveness, and visual balance of your website. The significance of these is that they have been basic components of Google’s search formula since May 2021 – and not accounting for them may cause your website to drop in the search engine results page.
There are three key SEO metrics that make up Core Web Vitals:
- LCP, or largest contentful paint. This is the amount of time it takes for your website’s primary content to load.
- FID, or first input delay. This metric measures how long it takes for a page to be fully interactive for users.
- CLS, or cumulative layout shift. CLS refers to any unexpected layout shifts on a website’s visual content, such as an image that randomly changes its size or a video that disappears as users scroll.
How to find your Core Web Vitals
Go to Google Search Console and click on ‘Enhancements’ and then select ‘Core Web Vitals Report’. This report will demonstrate the results of each website URL based on its state, measurements, and categorized groups of related webpages.
This report gives you the ability to assess which web addresses are subpar, require alterations, and which are satisfactory. Give precedence to the “Poor” URLs first followed by the “Needs Improvement” ones.
Why is page speed important?
Slow page loading speed is a major concern for search engines when ranking webpages, as well as delivering a positive user experience.
Need more proof? As reported by Portent, a decrease by 4.42% in the amount of conversions is the norm for any website, if the loading time goes up by one second between a range of 0 to 5 seconds. A recent Unbounce report established that almost 70 percent of people claim a sluggish loading speed on an eCommerce website would affect their decision to shop from that particular retailer.
Google prefers websites which load quickly, and customers also do. If you wish to raise your search engine rankings and boost your conversions, it is essential that you work on optimising the speed of your page.
How to find your site speed
In order to observe how quickly your webpage loads, go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights and enter the address of the site.
Google considers how quickly your page loads when deciding its ranking, but this also has implications on how satisfied your viewers are and how successful your site is.
Soon, Google Search Console will make it simpler to observe and identify potential issues by offering this data.
