How do you know how your SEO campaign is doing without tracking its performance? The answer: you don’t. To truly understand how your efforts produce results, you must utilise SEO metrics.
Unlike traditional offline marketing methods, one of the big advantages of digital marketing is the ability to measure your strategy – and that’s an opportunity you don’t want to waste.
The SEO metrics SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics measure can all be used to gain the valuable data you crave. There’s just one issue: these tools can fire too much information in your direction.
Fear not; this guide is here to cut through the noise. Instead of leaving you confused and overwhelmed by the process, we have compiled a list of the key SEO performance metrics to measure.
What Is SEO Metrics?
Before getting too far ahead, let’s make it clear what metrics for SEO actually are. Firstly, a metric is a measurement standard for data. No estimations are involved – it’s a straightforward look at the statistics collected.
When it comes to metrics for SEO, you can obtain reports that provide accurate measurements on solid indicators of success. Admittedly, you might not understand which SEO strategies produced these facts and figures; however, the results themselves – aka the metrics – are built via data points that are easy to track.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s look at the key SEO metrics that matter.
Organic Traffic
Understandably, website traffic is one of the most important SEO metrics to track. Still, this shouldn’t be your overall traffic numbers. Instead, the focus should be on the organic traffic you’re attracting. Yes, those overall traffic numbers indicate your website’s general performance, but they don’t tell the full picture. A much more detailed, accurate image is gained from organic stats.
Think about it: SEO is built around growing your search visibility, which in turn brings in organic traffic. As one of the best SEO metrics, it shouldn’t be a surprise this information is easily accessible via Google Analytics. Simply click “Organic Search” in the Acquisition section.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Another one of the essential organic SEO performance metrics is the click-through rate. The CTR tracks the percentage of users visiting your website after finding it on a search engine results page.
For example, say 1,000 people come across your page after a relevant search query on Google. Out of these people, 200 like what they see and want to find out more – so they click through to your site. That results in a 20% CTR for that specific page.
Why is CTR one of the SEO key metrics? Because it demonstrates how effective – or ineffective – a search engine listing of a specific page is. If the CTR is low and doesn’t entice clicks, this suggests you’re not hitting the mark with your title and meta description. Less likely, but it could also be due to the content not being relevant to the user’s search intention.
Bounce Rate
When a visitor “bounces” from your website, this is when they land on one of your pages, but then don’t proceed to any other page and leave.
Sure, it’s great that you’re attracting organic traffic to your site. However, you ultimately want to turn that visit into a conversion – and ensuring someone doesn’t leave straight away is one of the most important enterprise SEO metrics to track.
If your site suffers from a high bounce rate, this suggests the page that visitors are landing on isn’t delivering the content they want. If the SEO metrics showcase a low bounce rate, however, you can be safe knowing that the pages showing up in search rankings supply what visitors want.
Page Speed
With technical SEO reporting metrics, one of the most essential is page speed. Not only can a sluggish site speed impact your search rankings, but it can also negatively impact the user experience – and that results in a high bounce rate.
With Google’s PageSpeed Insights, it’s easy to see if your webpages are loading optimally or not. If it’s the latter, this tool will highlight areas to improve so you can ensure your site is loading fast across all devices.
Keyword Rankings
When it comes to SEO success metrics, you need to continually track how your website ranks for keywords. Why? Because if your search visibility drops for certain keywords, this will have detrimental effects on your entire SEO campaign.
You need to monitor keyword rankings, as this will show where you are against the competition. If keyword performance drops, for example, you’ll have to tweak your strategy to get back up to speed.
Domain Authority
With tracking SEO success metrics, it’s fair to say one of the most important is domain authority. When Google views your site as having a high domain authority, it will boost its search performance across the board.
Domain authority is one of the easiest SEO metrics to check and measure. Using a Website Authority Checker, you can enter your site’s URL, and it will then rank your site out of 100. The higher the number, the more authoritative your site is in the judgemental eyes of Google.
Backlinks and Referring Domains
You know that backlinks are among the most critical ranking signals. Due to this, it shouldn’t be a surprise this is one of the biggest SEO performance metrics you need to measure.
With your backlink profile, it’s not the quantity you want to pay the most attention – it’s the quality of those external links (other websites that host links to your website). It isn’t an exaggeration to say that a single backlink from a website with a high domain authority is worth more than 20 from low-to-average domains.
Tracking backlinks is also vital for removing low-value links that may harm your website’s search performance; Google penalises sites with backlinks from spam sites. As such, monitoring and removing any spammy, low-quality links that could impact your ranking is crucial for maintaining healthy SEO.
Need Assitance?
The metrics SEO campaigns need to track aren’t always so simple. However, when you utilise the tools available to monitor performance, it all becomes far easier to understand and stay on top of. With the above SEO reporting metrics, you can track the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, make adjustments when necessary, and reach new heights with your SEO efforts.
Of course, if you need help with your SEO campaign or prefer specialists to do it all for you, don’t hesitate to contact our experts here at Click Intelligence. We have two decades of experience in this gig, and we know how to craft, deploy and monitor a tailored, high-quality SEO strategy that gets results.
