Search engine optimization (SEO) works so well in particular because its results can be measured and analyzed. SEO metrics provide crucial insights into the precise performance of your organic search campaign, whether you’re interested in ranks, traffic, engagement, leads, orders, revenue, or authority.
In addition, SEO analytics are critical informational pieces for developing and refining strategies and goals. But how do you determine the important SEO metrics to measure SEO performance? After all, Google Analytics and other SEO tools have access to hundreds of data points.
What are SEO Metrics?
SEO metrics are indicators of how well a website is doing and should be tracked and monitored regularly. Tracking your SEO metrics is a good start if you want to improve your future SEO strategy.
You won’t be able to find possibilities to enhance the site’s visibility and increase revenue without having detailed tracking systems in place. While at the same time, you can miss the possible threats that could exist on your website. Furthermore, other SEO metrics analyze overall marketing performance.
SEO is always evolving, and Google’s algorithm is continually being updated. With this in mind, it’s critical that you regularly review important SEO metrics to measure SEO performance and to verify that your site is healthy, appropriately optimized, and providing value to visitors.
Your key performance indicators (KPIs) will improve if your SEO metrics are healthy.
Why should you track KPIs for SEO?
Is the time and effort you’ve put into SEO yielding satisfactory results? What steps can you take to ensure your hard work pays off? How can you improve the effectiveness of your website? Are you tracking the right SEO metrics to measure the SEO performance of your website?
If you’re keeping tabs on the correct performance indicators, you should be able to find the answers you want.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) serve as a kind of monitoring to help you determine the efficacy of various strategies. Most importantly, if you don’t see the promised return on investment, you may cut your losses by focusing on the ones showing positive results.
It is vital to track the correct SEO KPIs for success. There are four major reasons to track SEO KPIs:
- To measure return on investment from SEO practice
- To identify the opportunities to improve
- To monitor the progress against your goals
- To prioritize what works better
What SEO metrics should you track to measure SEO performance?
While Google’s ranking system considers over 200 factors, some are more weighted than others. Therefore not all KPIs and SEO metrics impact your website equally.
With that said, let’s learn the Top 11 SEO Metrics to Measure SEO Performance That Actually Matters.
- Organic traffic
Monitor how many people find your site through organic search engine results. It’s a crucial SEO statistic for figuring out whether your efforts are laying the groundwork for a successful SEO strategy.
There can be no conversions or income from your SEO efforts if there is no organic traffic. If people aren’t visiting your site, something is wrong and requires fixing.
Google Analytics allows you to monitor how much traffic you receive from search engines.
Keep tabs on the organic visitors you get from desktop and mobile devices. And constantly evaluating the quality of your traffic by comparing your organic statistics with your other SEO KPIs.
2. Organic CTR
Organic CTR (Click Through Rate) is the ratio of impressions on the website to clicks on search engine result pages (SERP).
CTR tells you the average of how many times your website appeared and how many times people clicked it. For example, if 1000 people see your listing in search results and 100 people click on it, then you have a CTR of 10%.
Google Search Console’s “Performance” section allows you to monitor impressions and CTR.
The ranking position of a website in search results has a substantial impact on its CTR.
If you rank higher, you’ll receive more clicks.
90% of clicks for a query go to the first page of Google, and a large portion of traffic clicks on the top three rankings.
3. Traffic value
The traffic value is the amount you’d spend for all of your organic clicks if they came from PPC search advertisements.
In general, the greater the value of your traffic, the more beneficial organic traffic becomes for your business.
Although you should utilize SEO to generate traffic throughout the customer journey, the most important clicks come from people who are likely to convert early.
Increasing traffic value is also a significant indicator of overall SEO performance growth. It is generally considered difficult to rank effectively for “money keywords” and get traffic from them compared to keywords that people typically search for when they are not looking to buy anything.
4. Keyword rankings
One of the most basic but essential SEO metrics to monitor is keyword rankings. They serve as a measurement of success and an early indicator of whether or not your SEO strategies are working. In addition, rankings provide the big picture of the possibility and the percentage of the organic market you already have.
Focus on both branded and non-branded search phrases while conducting keyword research.
Branded keywords are valuable since they reflect customers who are ready to buy. These words are also important for your online reputation. Non-branded keywords, on the other hand, are critical for influencing buyers throughout the decision-making stage of the customer journey.
5. New backlinks and referring domains
Backlinks are one of the most important factors that Google considers when ranking websites. A recent study shows there’s a strong relationship between website ranking and the number of referring domains.
The number of backlinks is the total number of links from other websites that point to your website, while the number of referring domains is the total number of different websites that link to your website.
More important than the total number of backlinks is the quality of those links. It is better to have ten backlinks from high-quality and authoritative domains than one hundred backlinks from mediocre or low-quality domains.
Although every link you create has the potential to improve your SEO, links coming from new referring sites are often more powerful than links coming from domains that have already linked to you.
6. Page speed
Google places a high value on user engagement. Numerous studies conducted over the years have shown that faster page speeds result in better conversion rates, whereas slower page speeds result in lower conversion rates.
Google took it a step further in 2020, introducing Core Web Vitals. More precise and advanced than traditional page load time metrics. Core Web Vitals is considered a search ranking factor from May 2021. Hence, they are highlighted here as a crucial SEO indicator.
Three aspects of the user experience are currently prioritized in the latest Google Core Web Vitals metrics — loading time, interaction, and visual stability.
7. Organic Conversions
Organic conversions are a crucial SEO statistic since they show if you’re obtaining the correct organic traffic. If your traffic is high, but your conversions (sign-ups, leads, purchases, etc.) are poor, it may be because you’re not attracting the correct visitors. You’re attracting people who don’t want your product.
If so, examine the keywords bringing visitors to your site to see if they match your client acquisition funnel.
For example, you sell protein bars and have a blog article on Halle Berry’s protein bar passion. This page gets a lot of organic search traffic but little interaction or sales. This suggests that the content attracts celebrity gossip seekers, not protein bar enthusiasts, and consumers.
Discover relevant keywords at the top, middle, and bottom of the marketer’s funnel to increase conversion rates and then focus on developing content around those specific keywords.
8. Authority Metrics (DA/TF/DR)
DA (Domain Authority), TF (Trust Flow), and DR (Domain Rating) are the three measures to check the authority of a website. They all come from different tools:
- DA comes from Moz
- TF comes from Majestic
- DR comes from Ahrefs
All three tools crawl the web constantly to find new sites and links. They review these links and update them. It’s important to know that none of these tools has crawled the whole web, and their algorithms work differently. You will always find differences if you look at the list of referring domains for any two websites.
Moz emphasizes that DA is determined by various criteria, including the referring domains and the overall number of backlinks to a domain. It is stated that DA is neither a ranking signal nor a Google indicator but rather a method for comparing websites.
The TF in Majestic, on the other hand, is computed differently: the program manually picks seed sites from the web that Majestic trusts. The scores displayed under TF determine how far a website is linked from a seed site.
Considering how Ahrefs’ website describes the algorithms, the DR appears similar to DA — “It’s a measure to represent the strength of a website’s complete backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).”
9. Organic Landing Page Metrics
Landing page metrics are essential for effectively tracking and monitoring the success of your landing page. Conversions can drop by 7% with a load time delay of only one second.
Businesses utilize landing page metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine whether they are meeting their goals and driving enough conversions.
You can’t tell whether your landing page is successful until you track these stats.
So, you now understand organic landing page metrics and why they are so crucial. But this won’t help you much if you don’t know which landing page KPIs to look at.
Here are the three most critical landing page metrics to track to properly analyze the performance of a marketing campaign that employs a landing page.
- Landing page views
Landing page views provide insight into which pages generate the most traffic and which are underperforming. This information may be seen in Google Analytics by going to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Pro tip: Increasing the number of page views isn’t as important as increasing conversions.
- Sessions by source
The sessions by source metric reveal the source of your landing page traffic. It assists you in determining which traffic sources should be maximized. For example, if paid advertisements are producing a lot of traffic but organic search isn’t even coming close, it’s time to refresh your website with new content
- Goal achievement (Conversions)
You must first set up goals in Google Analytics to measure conversions on your landing page. Goals are the number of times a visitor completes a specified activity (fill up the form, signup for an email newsletter, purchase an item, etc.).
10. Crawl Errors
A high number is not necessarily beneficial in SEO analytics. Crawl errors, for example, should be avoided at all costs.
A crawl error happens when a search engine attempts but fails to reach a page on your website. Crawl failures can be caused by various factors, including deleted sites, pages designated as ‘no-index,’ and pages prohibited in the robots.txt file.
If a page cannot be crawled, it cannot be indexed and will not receive organic search traffic. Hence it is critical to keep track of this scenario. If your website has an increase in crawl issues, Google may lose faith in the site and begin to demote any current ranks.
11. Indexed Pages
In its search results, Google only displays indexed pages. As a result, if your pages are not indexed, they will not receive organic search traffic. To ensure that all relevant pages on your site are correctly indexed, use Google Search Console.
If your indexed pages are duplicated, obsolete, irrelevant, or thin, your full site authority may suffer. Conduct a content audit to detect low-quality indexed pages and follow the steps below:
- Replace any obsolete content.
- Remove unnecessary stuff and redirect links
- Merge and compress multiple poor pages into much stronger, more useful pages, and redirect links as needed.
SEO Metrics Tools
The following is a list of SEO tools, some of which are free, and some are paid ones with additional functionality. We have provided you with an overview of some of the most useful aspects of each tool and instructions on how to make the most of them for your SEO strategy.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is still useful for managing your website’s SEO, especially when combined with Google Search Console. Doing so allows you to aggregate and save all of your website’s SEO data in one place, making it easier to run queries to determine where your site and individual pages might benefit from further optimization with the keywords and phrases you’ve chosen.
You can also use Google Analytics to learn more about SEO and improve your site in the following ways:
- It is important to filter out any referral traffic that might negatively impact your SEO statistics, such as traffic from suspicious sources.
- To see how organic website traffic stacks up against other types of website traffic, To grow traffic, you need to identify and prioritize your most successful traffic sources.
- Metrics regarding user interaction with your website’s content, such as time spent on a page, bounce rate, and exit rate, may all be found in the Site Content Reports, along with data on the pages’ acquisition, behavior, and conversion.
- Figure out which of your channels has brought you the most conversions and what those customers are worth to your firm.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides various tools to assist you in appearing in the SERPs for the search keywords and phrases your target audience is looking for.
Suppose you’re a business owner or an SEO on your marketing team. In that case, Search Console may help you undertake initial SEO research from scratch or upgrade your current SEO strategy with new keywords. Google Search Console watches, debugs, and optimizes your website – you don’t have to be a coder to use it.
Google Search Console will teach you about and help you optimize the following website parts:
- Keywords: Learn about the keywords for which your website presently ranks.
- Crawl errors: Identify any crawl errors that are present on your website.
- Mobile Responsiveness: Determine how mobile-friendly your website is and identify opportunities to enhance your consumers’ mobile experience.
- Google Index: Determine how many of your web pages are indexed by Google. If a page is not indexed, use the URL Inspection Tool to submit it for indexing.
- Analytics and metrics: The website metrics most important to you, such as clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush is an advanced dashboard that reports on websites’ overall and individual page performance. One of the resources provided by SEMrush is the SEO Toolkit.
The toolkit enables you to watch a website’s visibility increase over time and determine the keywords it is ranking for, the page’s position for a keyword, and the monthly search volume for that keyword, among other things.
SEMrush further enables you to:
- Build links: Create links by examining the backlinks that other websites have to your site.
- Keywords magic tool: Use the Keyword Magic tool to find every keyword you want for a successful SEO plan.
- Check out the tactics of your competitors: Find the paid keywords or ad content that your competitor is using in their PPC advertisements.
- Get recommendations: Learn how to optimize your content to enhance organic traffic.
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a sophisticated SEO tool that analyzes your website’s structure and generates keyword, link, and ranking profiles to aid your content selection.
Among Ahrefs’ key characteristics are the following:
- Site explorer: Displays information on the effectiveness of particular web pages on your site.
- Content explorer: Search high-performing websites using specified keywords and subjects with Content Explorer.
- Keyword explorer: The monthly search volume and click-through rates of particular keywords can be generated using the Keywords Explorer tool.
- Site Audit: Crawls the designated verticals on your domain and identifies various page-level technical problems.
5. Majestic (majestic.com)
Majestic is a link analysis-focused SEO software tool. Unlike Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz Pro, Majestic is solely concerned with backlinks.
To put it another way, Majestic isn’t a one-stop shop for keyword research, SEO site audits, and on-page SEO analysis. It is entirely focused on backlinks.
And, because they prioritize link analysis, they claim to have the greatest backlink checker in the world.
Let’s take a look at some of its key features.
- Site explorer summary: This is where you will receive a high-level overview of a website’s link profile. This page is intended to scan a site’s link profile and see crucial link metrics. You can also receive comprehensive link statistics on a single page by selecting “subdomain,” “Path,” or “URL” from the dropdown menu.
- Topics report: Majestic uses the “Topics” report to figure out what a website is about. This feature is interesting because they don’t figure out what your site is about based on the content you post. Instead, it depends on where your backlinks are coming from.
- Referring domains: Referring domains is like any other tool for looking at backlinks. It’s a list of all the websites that link to yours. You can also sort the results by Trust Flow, Top level domain, Citation Flow, and more.
- Anchor text breakdown: This is where you can see the most common anchor text that people use when they link to a domain or page. Here, a huge word cloud makes it easy to see which words are most common in the anchor text profile of a site.
Conclusion
Google’s ranking algorithm considers over 200 parameters, which means there are tons of SEO metrics to measure SEO performance. But in this above article, we’ve included the ones that matter the most. These metrics are a must to track to get positive results from your SEO practices.
To measure the SEO metrics, many free and paid SEO tools are available, and free tools will do most of your work. They are good to start with, and as you progress and require more data to analyze, you can switch to paid SEO tools.