The digital landscape continues to evolve, and understanding the right Search Engine Optimization (SEO) metrics to track is more crucial than ever for businesses. SEO metrics provide insight into the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, helping you make data-driven decisions and improvements. Here, we’ll explore ten key SEO metrics that are worth tracking to ensure your SEO efforts are yielding desired results.
10 Essential SEO Metrics to Track for Success:
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic, the non-paid clicks that originate from search engines, is a fundamental metric. An upward trend in organic traffic signifies that your SEO strategies are effective. However, remember that high organic traffic doesn’t always translate into more sales unless you’re monetizing your traffic through ads or your website has a high conversion rate.
2. Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings denote your website’s organic positioning in search results for specific keywords. Tracking keyword rankings allows you to monitor your SEO performance over time for the most crucial keywords related to your product and business. A good ranking for relevant keywords boosts organic traffic and conversions.
3. Search Visibility
Search visibility is the share of clicks your website receives from your tracked keywords. Like Share of Voice (SOV) in marketing, the higher your search visibility, the larger your share in the market. Since it’s a relative metric, it’s often a more fitting KPI than mere organic traffic growth.
4. Traffic Value
Traffic value refers to the cost you’d incur for all your organic clicks if they were derived from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search ads. A higher traffic value signifies more valuable organic traffic to your business. Enhancing traffic value is an excellent indicator of overall SEO performance growth.
5. Organic Traffic Conversions
Conversions are critical actions that visitors undertake on your website, such as checking out, signing up, or subscribing to a service. Tracking conversions across all traffic sources, including organic, is essential to align marketing efforts with revenue. It is the most direct way to quantify the financial impact of your SEO efforts.
6. Referring Domains
Referring domains are websites that link to your website. Backlinks are a major Google ranking factor, and there’s a clear positive correlation between referring domains and organic traffic. An upward trend in referring domains suggests that your link building, PR, and branding efforts are on the right track.
7. Indexed Pages
The number of indexed pages indicates how many pages from your website a search engine has in its index. A steady increase in indexed pages as you publish new content is a good sign. Any sudden changes in this number may signify a technical SEO issue that needs to be addressed.
8. Index Coverage Errors
Index coverage errors occur when anything unintentionally prevents your pages from being indexed. These errors can be due to various reasons, and when they surface, it’s crucial to fix them promptly to ensure your pages are indexed and appear in search results.
9. Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of metrics related to website speed and user experience, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Google uses CWV as a ranking factor, emphasizing the need for a great user experience, good loading speed, and smooth interactivity.
10. Website Health Score
The Website Health Score is a metric reflecting the proportion of internal URLs on your website free from technical SEO errors. It provides a reliable snapshot of your overall technical SEO health. Observingchanges in your Health Score over time helps identify specific errors that need addressing, ensuring your website maintains optimal performance.
SEO Metrics to Avoid
While the above metrics provide valuable insights, it’s equally important to note that some popular metrics may not offer substantial value to your SEO strategy. These include bounce rate, exit rate, pages per session, and average session duration/time on page. While these metrics provide some insight into user behavior, they don’t directly reflect the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and can sometimes lead to misleading conclusions.
Conclusion
In the ever-changing digital marketing landscape, tracking the right SEO metrics is crucial for success. By focusing on these ten key SEO metrics and avoiding less meaningful ones, you can better understand your website’s performance, make data-driven decisions, and continually improve your SEO strategy for better results.