Here are seven important SEO metrics that can help you stay on top of your overall SEO strategy.
1. Ecological traffic
If you’ve invested in building an SEO strategy, one of the first questions you probably have is whether people are actually visiting your website. And if so, how do they find it? Organic traffic analysis can give you answers to these questions. You can use Google Analytics as a free tool, but SEO software such as Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush can provide more specialized information.
When you connect Google Analytics to your website, you will be able to see general information about your website visitors, where they come from (search engines, social media, direct, etc.), their general location, how long they stay on your website, which pages are most popular and more. All of this is valuable information to track as it can give you a better understanding of how to improve your website. If your intention is for people to click on “shop”, but your store is your least viewed page, you may need to think about the design of your website and how to make the store more visible, for example.
2. Keyword placements
Keyword rankings indicate how well your target keywords perform on search engines. You can use SEO-specific software such as Ahrefs or Semrush to track this information. This will help you decide whether to target different keywords, add long-tail keywords, or adjust your overall SEO strategy.
3. Page loading speed
Have you ever visited a website only to leave a few seconds later when the page couldn’t load fast enough? Page load speed can have a huge impact on whether or not visitors end up staying on your site. But it also affects how well you rank in the search engines. Although the algorithm is constantly changing, sites with faster page upload speeds will be favored over slower ones. You can use PageSpeed Insights to find out how fast your website loads. If you think it’s slow, there are several steps you can take to speed it up. Compressing images and ensuring that images are in the correct format are two examples.
4. Rejection rate
Another metric you’ll want to consider is bounce rate, or the number of people who enter your site only to leave after viewing just one page. While there will always be some visitors who bounce after finding what they’re looking for on the first page, a high bounce rate can mean that the keywords driving people to your website and your content don’t match. It can also mean that your website is difficult to navigate or is slow to load. If you find that a specific page has a high bounce rate, you can look at what additional information visitors might be interested in and find a way to incorporate that into the web page. For example, if the page is a blog article, you can include a “read more” section at the end of the article.
5. Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites that go to your website. The more sites that link to yours, the more this tells the search engines that your site is valuable and will push it up in the rankings. You can actively build backlinks by reaching out to other websites, or you can do this organically by creating great content in the hope that more websites will start linking to yours.
It is more important to have quality backlinks than a specific number. So instead of trying to get any site to link to yours to have another backlink, think more about which sites would make sense to feature your site. Linking to other sites can also help with this, as other sites are likely tracking their backlinks and will see when you link to theirs.
6. Content Engagement
You want to look at how visitors interact with your site. How long do they spend on each page? Which pages are the most popular? Which page is the last page visitors typically click on before leaving the website? Tools such as Google Analytics can provide insights about content engagement.
7. Conversion rate
All of the metrics listed above are helpful in understanding whether your SEO strategy is working, but at the end of the day, your ultimate goal is probably a specific call to action (CTA) you want visitors to take, when they visit your website, whether to buy a product, sign up for a newsletter or download a specific piece of content. That’s why it’s important to track your conversation speed. This will tell you how many people are actually taking the actions you want them to take.
In other words, if you have thousands of visitors to your website per month, but none of them buy your product, you may need to rethink your overall SEO strategy to find out why. Are you attracting the wrong type of customers? Is there a technical problem with the website? Is there a mismatch between keyword and topic? The conversion rate will tell you if you are on track in terms of how your business goals are meeting your SEO efforts.