Being a marketer is a full-time job, even more so if you’re an SEO specialist. Your months of efforts will only bear fruit if you know how to measure your SEO performance.
You have to know what works, what doesn’t, and, more importantly, what can be done to improve things.
But how exactly can you do that?
In layman’s terms, what’s the best technique to measure your SEO performance?
You’ll find many answers to this question, but you should be concerned with only one – monitoring the right key performance indicators (KPIs).
It can help determine how many dead plants you’re watering, metaphorically speaking. So, if you’re wondering about the most important SEO metrics to measure, the following are a few that should be on your list:
11 Metrics to Help Track Your SEO Performance
1. Organic Traffic
Let’s start with the most basic one.
Organic traffic refers to your website’s non-paid visitors diverted from various search engines. It’s a key indicator of whether your SEO foundation is solid or shaky.
If your website isn’t receiving organic traffic, you’re doing something wrong, which should be immediately fixed.
Tracking organic traffic, fortunately, is quite simple. You can use Google Search Console’s ‘Performance’ tab to see how many visitors your website gets.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is an SEO metric that measures engagement while users are still on a search engine.
So, if 100 people see your listing and 10 click it, you have a 10% CTR. This is quite similar to how impressions work.
A significant factor contributing to your increased or lowered CTR is your meta title, description, and URL. The more appealing these elements are, the higher chances of earning more clicks.
3. Exit Rate
If how many people visit your page is an excellent SEO metric, then so is measuring the percentage exiting your domain. However, it’s not as effective.
That’s because if a page has high exit rates, it doesn’t necessarily mean something’s wrong.
For instance, if you own an informative website, maybe visitors exit because they found what they were looking for. Though tracking exit rates isn’t as useful as other SEO metrics, it should be on your list nonetheless.
4. Bounce Rate
Like exit rate, many SEO experts recommend ignoring bounce rate. However, we beg to differ.
Bounce rate, roughly defined as the percentage of individuals who visit only one page of your website, can be useful in a handful of cases. This includes identifying problems with a certain page instead of your entire website.
The issue could be anything, from too many pop-up ads to incomplete or inaccurate information, which interferes with a seamless user experience.
5. Keyword Rankings
One of the simplest yet critical SEO metrics you must track is keyword rankings. It’s simple because you can measure keyword rankings using third-party tools.
And it’s critical because measuring keyword rankings helps you determine the overall effectiveness of your SEO campaign.
It’s crucial to remember keyword rankings constantly fluctuate; that shouldn’t be a problem. However, a sudden drop in rankings doesn’t paint a pretty picture, and you should look into it ASAP.
6. Search Visibility
Some call it search visibility, others prefer the terms organic market share. Both are the same and measure how much organic search traffic your website receives compared to the total number of available clicks.
Search visibility is directly connected to keywords.
So, if a keyword you rank for gets typed 100 times and your link is clicked five times, your search visibility is 5% (for that specific keyword).
7. Backlinks
Also called incoming or inbound links, backlinks direct users from one website page to another. Google considers backlinks a substantial ranking factor, which is why you must measure them.
One thing to remember about backlinks is to follow the ‘quality over quantity approach.’ 5 links from authoritative domains are better than 50 links from average domains.
And if the 5 links are from different domains and not the same, even better.
8. Indexed Pages
If there’s one thing to learn about this metric, it’s that Google only displays indexed pages. So, if yours isn’t one of them, don’t expect to see your link pop up anywhere on the search engine.
And only indexing pages isn’t enough; they must be up to date. Otherwise, having outdated or irrelevant pages, even if they’re indexed, could significantly hurt your site’s rankings.
This SEO metric is especially important if you own a website with multiple pages.
9. Mobile-Friendliness
Does it matter if visitors can seamlessly open your website on their smartphones? A few years ago, no, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Today?
A big and resounding YES.
And it’s easy to understand why.
Almost 93% of users access the internet via their mobiles.
Therefore, if you haven’t optimized your web pages for smartphones, now’s a good time. Even more so, considering Google processes more searches from mobile devices than desktop.
10. Website Health Score
Website health score assesses a number of elements of your website, like its:
- Overall performance
- SEO-friendliness
- Accessibility
- Number of URLs with errors
- Percentage of crawled URLs
The highest score a website can get is 100, and the lowest is 0. That said, even if your website is above 90, it’s a pretty good score.
Tracking your website health score allows you to measure whether you deliver a smooth user experience to visitors.
11. Page Speed
The last metric that can help improve SEO performance and visibility is how fast your page loads when accessed through various browsers or devices. The update was announced almost 5 years ago.
The reason for including page speed as a ranking factor is simple – fast loading speed translates to a better user experience. And any website that delivers a better user experience is a winner in Google’s books.
It’s essential to clarify that we mean the web page speed on a mobile and a desktop.
Ready to Improve SEO Using These Performance Metrics?
It’s impossible to conquer the digital landscape without having a sound SEO strategy. In many cases, companies are somehow able to develop one, but it doesn’t produce the desired results.
If this situation sounds familiar, there’s no need to panic. Instead, review the SEO metrics we’ve outlined in this blog. And if that doesn’t work either, you’ve got Design Genious.
Our seasoned SEO technicians will assess your website to address and fix issues preventing it from performing to the fullest.
