There is so much data that can be extracted from your website that it can tell you how many visitors to your website, where they came from, and whether or not they took your offer. In marketing, we may become data hoarders, including when we run SEO.
In SEO, there are several metrics that are very important to track so that we can design a marketing strategy.
But, what are these metrics? Let’s take a look at the 8 most important metrics in SEO.
The 8 Most Important SEO Metrics to Track
1. Organic Traffic
OK. Let’s start with the obvious metrics. In order to find out whether all the time you’ve spent on your SEO strategy is paying off, you need to know what your organic traffic metrics look like. Organic traffic is the number of website visitors who come to your website from search engines. You don’t pay for ads on Google to get them to visit your website or refer them through other websites. These visitors find you when they do a search on Google.
Your organic traffic metric is very important as it will tell you how well you are ranking and what strategies are most successful for your website.
You can use Google Analytics to view organic search sessions, new users, bounce rate, and page duration.
2. The Keywords You Are Ranking For
There are 2 types of keyword rankings related to SEO. We’ll explain the first one here, the keywords you rank here and below. This metric tells you what keywords you are ranking for.
For example, an office supply company might rate notebooks without having to go to great lengths to rate the key phrase “notebook”. This is great because notebooks are definitely the product they are selling. This gives them a starting point to determine what other keywords they rank for.
To find out what keywords to rank for, you can use Google Search Console.
3. The Keywords You Want to Rank for
But what about the keywords you WANT to rank for? In the example above, the office supplies company might want to rate it for… “office supplies”. Notebooks are great and fit into their niche, but a rating for “office supplies” can make a big difference to their business.
This is why you want to track the keywords you want to rank for. You should look at how many searches a particular keyword has each month and then look at the results of those searches thoroughly to see where opportunities are being provided by the ranking for that keyword.
You can use a tool like SearchVolume.io or Keyword Everywhere to see the search volume for keywords. Then, you can find out what keywords you are worth aiming for.
4. Alexa ranking
Voice search should be a concern for you. Ranking on voice searches (depending on your industry) can give your business fantastic results. Ranking your ideal keyword on Google is important. Ranking on Alexa is the next step.
48% of consumers in Adobe’s survey said they use voice for web searches. Of that 48%, 85% use voice on their phone and 39% use it on their Amazon Alexa or Google Home. While sound may seem insignificant to you right now – it’s worth seeing how it could be so important in the future.
Tools like Alexa.com can provide SEO analysis, competitive website analysis, keyword research information and much more depending on how important your Alexa search ranking is.
5. Backlinks to Your Site vs. Competitor
Tracking your backlinks will give you an idea of how good your content is. If the content is very good, then you will get lots of free backlinks. However tracking your competitors’ backlinks will help you see which of their content is really good and where the weaknesses are in your content.
If you see tons of backlinks to a specific blog post – this is a good sign. The post is important enough for other websites that they quote it which increases your ranking in the search rankings.
You can see backlinks to your website in Google Search Console and backlinks to your competitors using tools like Moz.
SEO Benefits for Business
No | SEO Benefits for Business |
1 | Make your website appear on the first page of search engines |
2 | Potential to get a CTR (Click-Through Rate) of up to 60% |
3 | Get more targeted visitors |
4 | Potential to increase the number of sales and increase repeat orders |
5 | Can compete with big business |
6 | Increase brand awareness |
7 | SEO works 24 hours a day |
8 | SEO results data can be used for business development |
6. Page Load Speed
This is one of those metrics that seem insignificant — but in reality, it should be one of the first metrics. The page loading speed will have a big impact on your bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who leave your website a few seconds after visiting. This ranking is a negative indicator for Google that your content is not what they are looking for – meaning Google wants to find someone else to replace your website.
Not only is your bounce rate affected by page speed, but Google will lower your SEO ranking if your page speed is slow. The general rule is to make your page speed less than 2 seconds.
You can use Page Speed Insight by Google to see the loading speed of each of your web pages.
7. Social Traffic
Tracking your social traffic is essential for businesses that incorporate time, money and effort into a social media strategy. If your offer on Instagram doesn’t turn followers into website visitors – it’s time to rethink your social media strategy.
Your social traffic will tell you how many website visitors come from social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. By tracking these metrics, you can see how good your social strategy is, how well your campaigns are performing, or what types of social media offerings are creating big spikes in your website traffic.
Google Analytics will show you how many website visitors come from social media channels.
8. Organic Conversion
The last, no less important metric is organic conversions. How many website visitors who found you from Google search chose to accept your offer? This metric will determine your future SEO strategy. Having 100,000 monthly website visitors is awesome … but only if you can convert at least 10% of them into customers.
Organic conversion is your view of how well your content converts website visitors into email subscribers, motivates these visitors to take part in lead magnets, or buys tripwire offers.
Within Google Analytics, you can define conversion goals so you can see how well your content is converting to traffic.
SEO looks scary and full of competition, but there are many free tools from Google that can help you.
Google wants your content to rank well, use these metrics to keep your SEO strategy sharp and to determine where you need to improve.
Services: seo services Indonesia & freelance website designer