Tracking your SEO efforts is critical in determining how successful they are. Chances are, you’ve probably invested a sizeable amount of time and money in creating and maintaining your SEO plan. Which is why you want to make sure that your investment was well spent.
If you’ve never measured SEO metrics, though, you might be at a loss. There are many different metrics that you could track, which is why it can get complicated. That’s where you’re in luck—we put together a list of the five most important SEO metrics to track. This basic primer reviews all five and even explains where to find the data. Once you’ve determined the metrics that you want to track, be sure to enter them into an Excel sheet to easily keep them all in one place.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors that your site attracts from an organic search. This number is important because it tells you how many people are finding your page on their own volition. It’s different than the number of total site visitors and gives you insight into your SEO strategy’s direct impact. If your strategy is working, the organic traffic to your site will increase.
To track this metric, go to the Google Analytics page. Go to “Acquisition”, then “Overview” and then choose “Organic Search.” This report will show your site’s monthly organic traffic. If you need to, you can adjust the report’s timeframe to reflect the long-term impact of your SEO strategy.
Clickthrough Rate
This SEO tracking metric gives you insight into the percentage of visitors who come to your page after finding your site in search results. This particular metric tells you how effective your page and keywords are at grabbing a user’s attention. It’s also a direct correlation between the quality of your site’s page titles and meta description. Finally, clickthrough rates are dependent and reflective of your site’s rankings.
If you have low clickthrough rates, you may need to re-evaluate your title tags and meta description. Be sure to monitor this metric over time to see how your site improves or what work you need to do.
Bounce Rate
Just like a bounced check, a SEO bounce rate refers to people who land on your page but leave. The percentage of visitors who do this on your page is referred to as your bounce rate. This SEO metric is a significant indicator of the effectiveness of your site’s content. In today’s digital marketing revolution, content marketing is hugely important.
Site visitors come to your site because of your SEO keywords and organic traffic searches, but if you don’t have the valuable content to captivate their attention, they’ll leave. This metric will let you know if you need to invest in improving the content of your site. If your rate is high, you know that you’ve got some work cut out for you.
Page Speed
We live in an age where users expect instant page loading and instant gratification. Think about when you’re online. If a page is taking too long to load, you probably close out of that window and look for a different page. Make sure to invest in optimizing your site—you can check this with Google’s Page Speed Insights—so that you can have a fast site that entices users to stay.
Don’t let something this simple get in the way of you earning visitors.
Conversions
The SEO metric gives great insight into your strategy on your company’s goals. Some experts consider the conversion to be the most important metric into gauging the overall success of your strategy. Goals will be different for each company and can range from downloads to lead captures.
Conclusion
If you want to have a successful SEO strategy, you need to make sure that you dedicate time to SEO tracking metrics. If you’re not tracking organic traffic, clickthrough rates, bounce rate, page speed, and conversions, you’re missing out on valuable information into how to improve your SEO strategy and set your company up for success.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
- 5 Simple SEO Tracking Metrics That Matter - October 29, 2019
