It is essential for a business owner to know whether every strategy applied to your business is working or not.
It’s important to track the performance of your content to see which ones are performing well and which ones are not. This will help you create more content that is successful.
You will need to check for things like how many people are reaching the page, what search keywords they used, how long they stay on the page, what device they used when visiting it, and so on. Some SEO firms are now investing in agency reporting tools which is a centralized platform that cubs all marketing campaign data in one place and sends accurate and automated reports to clients. With such frequent updates, making business decisions becomes easy and you can track all the information that you need.
I’m gonna share 10 SEO metrics that can help you stay on top of all.
1. Domain Authority/Domain Rating
It is a score used by major SEO tools to calculate the overall SEO strength of a website. The number of factors calculates the score.
Factors like the number of backlinks, quality of referring domains, and more. The score lies between 0 to 100, and it’s built on a logarithmic scale.
Work towards increasing your Domain Authority if you want your site to appear at the top of the search results. DA is a popular metric from Moz. In my practice, I have found Moz Chrome Extention extremely useful in evaluating any domain.
2. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic tells how many visitors come to your website through organic search.
You should also be tracking the number of organic search traffic your site gets. A key SEO metric tells you whether your SEO efforts are delivering the foundations of a successful SEO program.
You can track your organic traffic in Google Analytics. Observe your organic traffic for both desktop and mobile. And try to cross-reference your organic traffic data with your other SEO KPIs so that you can always assess the quality of your traffic.
These are the users who found your website and clicked on it without paid ads involved. Ahrefs Site Explorer is an awesome tool for measuring the website’s organic performance. It provides you with the numbers you need, from organic traffic to backlinks.
3. On-page Optimization Scores
On-page optimization, as the name suggests, is the process of optimizing the contents of a page both for users and search engines. Ahrefs Site Audit tool analyzes a page and then provides a score that reflects how well the page is optimized for SEO. The score may depend on the following:
- Keyword density
- Keywords in headings and subheadings
- Internal and external linking
- The meta description
- URL
- Page title
- Image alt tags
On a separate note, Google has come up with some interesting Core Web Vitals updates that focus on three main on-page experiences – LCP, FID, and CLS. So many businesses have experienced a drop in their organic traffic as their website does not satisfy these metrics.
If you’re facing some issues in CWV, I’d seriously recommend you to take a deeper look. If you can’t find the right solutions by yourself, you should look for an SEO advisor. You can easily find quality advisors/freelancers on websites like LinkedIn, Upwork, or Freelancer. They normally charge by the hour and you can pay them after services are rendered.
4. Keyword Ranking
This refers to the position of the webpage on the SERPS depending on the keyword search query. Therefore, an increase in the website rankings also increases the probability of driving traffic to your webpage.
Keyword ranking can be measured using tools like Moz’s Keyword Explorer or Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer.
5. Text readability SEO metrics
Most SEO metrics track information like page views, traffic data, and target keyword rankings easily. Text readability and relevance are imperative for users since they deliver an awesome experience.
Additionally, they’re important to search engines like Google and Bing as they make your text easy to grasp.
6. Click-through Rate (CTR)
CTR tells you the amount percentage of impressions in the Google SERPs that actually generated a click-through to your web page.
For example, if 100 searchers see the page in the search results that include your link and one person clicks through, you will have a CTR of 1%. You can also track your CTR directly in the Google Search Console’s “Performance” module.
There is a strong correlation between CTR and ranking position. The more clicks you get, the higher you will rank.
For example, although the first page of Google earns around 90% of the clicks for a single query, the majority of traffic comes from the top three positions in Google.
7. Organic Visibility
Organic visibility is another important KPI that helps you measure how much organic search traffic your website gets in comparison to the total available clicks. It takes into account both ranking position and search volume, which drives click-through rate (CTR).
Many SEO tools provide visibility scores based on where you rank for all. Both scores are essential to track as they give you an instant snapshot of how your website is performing in terms of SEO.
8. Organic Conversions
Organic conversion is the crux for all KPIs. They help you know whether you are getting the relevant organic traffic to your site and not the one that does not have the potential to convert.
If your traffic numbers are high but your conversions are low, it may be a sign that you may need to restrategize your content marketing plan.
For instance, check keywords, create a better buyer persona, use a better lead generation strategy, find where they are in most numbers, and how you can give them relevant content.
9. Backlinks
The number of pages from other websites that link to your website is known as backlinks. Having high-quality website links can boost website ranking in the long run.
On that note, Ahrefs is a highly recommended tool because it allows you to track your backlinks and keywords and track what your competitors are doing.
10. Impression Volume
Impression volume means the number of times your webpage has been shown in Google or other search engine results pages (SERPS).
Knowing this helps you to measure your website’s visibility which is to know if your website is being seen in the first place.
There has been a constant debate about whether impressions can influence your website’s ranking or not, but what you need to look at here is if your website is being seen and by how many.
By comparing it side-to-side with your click-through rate (CTR), you can measure the ratio and judge for yourself if it’s a healthy number or not.
Extra Tip:
The KPIs above are some of the most straightforward ways to calculate the impact of your SEO strategy.
And as these are easy to use, it is important that you don’t forget about some parts of your site’s performance, like user experience.
For instance, Crazy Egg’s Confetti tool can show you where each of the visitors to any given page on your site clicks.
Once you analyze your website, you can take steps to optimize the website for better reach and conversions.
Conclusion
Measuring the performance of the website is an essential part of the search engine optimization process.
It’s how you estimate whether your strategy is working or not. Suppose you’re not yet tracking SEO metrics like organic traffic, CTR, bounce rate, keyword rankings, domain authority, backlinks, and conversions.
Tools like Google Analytics and Search Console are of great fortune because these make tracking relatively easy.
So if you’re ready to get a more accurate idea of how your SEO efforts are impacting your business, you’ll want to spend some time determining which metrics are most important for your goals.
