SEO Tracking Metrics That Matter Organic Traffic. One of the most important metrics for measuring SEO results is organic traffic. In this post, I'll show you the 15 best SEO metrics to track, plus the tools to monitor them. Not all KPIs and SEO success metrics are created equal.
Although Google has approximately 200 ranking factors in its algorithm, some are more important than others. To that end, let's take a look at the 15 most important SEO metrics that you should keep track of on a regular basis. Of course, keep track of your general backlinks and referring domains. However, if you want your organic traffic to grow substantially, the number of new referring domains should also increase.
Monitor this metric to ensure that your link building efforts support your SEO strategy. Every time your page appears in a Google search result, it's considered an impression, even if the user hasn't scrolled down and saw your ad. Impressions are an early indicator of your SEO campaign's performance. As rankings improve, impressions will increase.
Then, when you enter the top 3, your traffic will start to increase. Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush help you stay on top of new referring domains, domain authority and keyword rankings. ContentKing, DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog allow you to identify technical errors within your site and then correct them. Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom help you measure page load time.
Use Yoast and Clearscope for on-page optimization and text readability. According to a Databox survey, a whopping 81% of SEOs track sales and leads (conversions) to measure ROI. All the SEO effort in the world is useless unless it actually brings you organic traffic. Tracking organic sessions over time is one of the strongest indicators of performance metrics.
Barring odd seasonal fluctuations, a month-over-month increase in organic search visitors shows that your rankings are improving (even for keywords you weren't targeting). Track your search performance with a personalized Google Analytics dashboard. Try it free for 14 days. You can also see how you can present organic traffic and other top metrics in your reports with our sample SEO report template here.
To measure the quality of your traffic, you need to track organic conversions. To track organic conversions, you'll first need to set up your conversion goal or events in Google Analytics. With Google's AI-based search algorithm, a shift to personalization, and continually changing search results, should you bother keeping track of keyword rankings? Track keyword rankings with our Tracker. A Backlinko study analyzed 1 million Google search results and found the same thing: there is a strong correlation between rankings and the number of referring domains.
This is the term coined by Moz to measure the authority of a domain name on a scale of 0 to 100 (based on links, brand mentions, etc. The higher this number, the more reliable the domain. You need to track specific metrics to ensure that your customer's organic traffic comes from the right audience. You can track Google Maps and Google 3-Pack rankings directly in your AgencyAnalytics ranking tracker.
Quickly identify and correct technical SEO issues with our SEO auditing tool. The 15 SEO metrics listed here will give you a complete overview of your SEO efforts, regardless of the scale and complexity of your campaign. To automate the process of tracking SEO metrics, check out our SEO report template here. But which metrics are the most important to track? Here are 12 that stand out from the rest.
Organic traffic is defined as the traffic you gain by appearing on search engine results pages (SERP) without paying for placement. It's important to keep track of your overall organic traffic so you can see how many people are visiting your site as a result of your SEO strategy. You also need to track organic traffic by landing page. Why? Because this is how you can determine where you need to improve.
If you find that some pages are ranked on page 1 while others are on page 7, you know that you need to direct your SEO efforts to those pages that are poorly positioned. It's important to keep track of where your organic traffic came from. This is especially true if your SEO efforts are targeted at specific geographic locations or if you plan to expand your business into new markets. Alternatively, if you see heavy organic traffic from countries that aren't profitable for your business, you might want to find out why.
You may need to adjust your SEO strategy to focus more on target countries. Even if the vast majority of your organic traffic comes from the U.S. In the US, your product or service may attract people from some states more than others. The only way to know is by tracking organic traffic by state.
Going even deeper, it could be the case that your brand attracts people in metropolitan areas. That's why it's good to examine organic traffic by city. You'll want to check your aggregate conversion rate for organic traffic. That way, you'll get an idea of how well you're generally attracting people who come to your site from search results.
However, you'll also want to drill down into several segments to see what factors are affecting conversion rates. By tracking organic conversions by geographic location, you might find that your messages attract people from specific areas. If you find that your message resonates with people in one or more locations, follow the basics of Business 101 and invest more marketing money in those regions. It's almost impossible to get a healthy market share unless you attract a mobile audience.
To check the attractiveness of your site to people using mobile devices, you should check the conversion rate per device for organic traffic. That's why you need to check the conversion rate per browser for organic traffic. That's why you should examine your organic traffic breakdown between those two search engines. It's also a good idea to capitalize on your current success.
If you find that your site is in the top 10 for high-converting keywords, continue to use them in your content marketing campaigns to make sure you stay there. Your most important keywords are likely to drive you more traffic, so make sure that the landing pages associated with those keywords are relevant to keep your bounce rate low. Specifically, does your site appear in the local package of 3 keywords related to your niche? Does it appear when people write the name of your town or city plus the name of your industry? If not, it's time to work on a local SEO. Well, today you're going to see exactly what SEO metrics you should track.
And how to double what is already generating the best results for you. With that, here are the 10 most important SEO metrics to monitor. Core Web Vitals is Google's way of evaluating the overall user experience of your site. That's why I recommend you pay close attention to your Core Web Vitals report.
Earlier this year, my team and I conducted a Google SERP analysis of 11 million results. We also found that websites with many referring domains tend to rank higher in Google's organic search. Referring domains are the number of different sites that link to you. Not the total number of backlinks.
That's why I recommend focusing more on referring domains than on total backlinks. In fact, I basically ignore the “Backlinks” when I check my site on Semrush. Instead, I focus 100% on “referring domains”. Organic traffic is another way to measure the amount of traffic you receive from Google Organic.
I've already covered the Core Web Vitals report (it's the second SEO metric on this list). The thing is, Core Web Vitals doesn't tell you the whole story. That's why Core Web Vitals focuses almost 100% on those two things. But if you ONLY pay attention to Core Web Vitals, you're missing out on the whole UX image.
In fact, the study of more than 11 million result ranking factors I mentioned earlier found a strong correlation between dwell time and first page ranking. And nothing says “this page sucks”, so someone spends 5 seconds on a page before returning to search results. For example, let's take a look at my page with a bounce rate above 80%. Yes, these SEO metrics are important.
That's why you don't want to focus 100% on organic traffic. Instead, you should also pay attention to your SEO traffic cost. The cost of SEO traffic is an estimate of how much you would pay in Google Ads for the traffic you receive from Google Organic. As the name suggests, indexed pages are the number of pages on your site that Google has indexed.
There are two easy ways to find out how many indexed pages you have. And make sure that the number of pages indexed is in line with the number of pages you WANT to index. Which led to the site soaring to more than 12,000 indexed pages. Especially if you have an e-commerce site with more than 10,000 pages).
Let's start with the obvious. Organic traffic is the traffic you get from search engine results pages (SERP) without paying for ad placement. Your overall traffic can come from multiple sources (search engines, social networks, direct searches, other sites), and if you focus on organic traffic, your website's visibility is shown in the search for keywords related to your business and niche. Therefore, if your SEO strategy works, the number of visitors you get from search results should increase steadily.
To track organic traffic in Google Analytics, log in to your dashboard and select “Add segment” in the default audience overview. Select “Organic Traffic” and click “Apply”. You can now see organic traffic as a percentage of total traffic. Pages per session, an important metric of user engagement on the site, indicate the number of pages users visit on average before saying goodbye to your site.
The higher this metric, the better, since it means that people visit multiple pages and stay longer. Conventional performance metrics, such as load time and DOMContentLoaded, focus on details that are easy to measure but don't necessarily translate well into what matters to users. So, if you focus solely on optimizing the average page load time, you may end up with a website that still generates a poor user experience. Backlinks are one of the most critical ranking signals on Google.
In addition, a recent study of more than 11 million Google search results suggests that there is a strong correlation between rankings and the number of referring domains. Quality of backlinks matters more than quantity. Ten links from authoritative and high-quality domains are more valuable than 100 backlinks from medium or low quality domains. And while every link you create can help your SEO, links from new referring domains are usually more powerful than links from domains that are already linked to you.
For example, if 10 visitors bought something on your website yesterday, but only four did it today, is your website doing badly today? Not necessarily. If the products sold today are more expensive than what you sold yesterday, or if the total order value is higher than yesterday, the number of conversions gives an inaccurate impression of how well your site is doing. If you ask SEOs what data they look at the most, it's likely organic traffic. However, it is not an indicator of SEO success without more context in most cases.
In fact, you should never trust a single number without knowing what is behind it. So let's first address the complexities of organic traffic. If your organic traffic is trending upward, it could be a sign that your SEO efforts are paying off. However, keep in mind that more organic traffic doesn't necessarily mean more sales, unless you monetize your website traffic by showing ads.
Keyword rankings refer to the organic rankings of a website in search results for particular keywords. Tracking the ranking of your keywords allows you to monitor your SEO performance for your most important keywords over time. There is a strong relationship between SOV and market share. Generally speaking, the higher your SOV, the greater your share of the pie.
And the fact that it's a relative metric makes it a better fit KPI than organic traffic growth. Generally speaking, the higher the value of your traffic, the more valuable organic traffic will be to your business. The increase in traffic value is also a big sign of overall SEO performance growth. Ranking well for “money” keywords and getting more traffic from them is generally much more difficult than ranking for the keywords that people usually search with no intention of buying anything.
You must first index your pages to appear in the SERPs and generate organic traffic, but you'll also want to keep some pages out of the index. I'm sure you've heard the phrase “less is more” many times. The same applies to data analysis as well. So here's why you shouldn't waste time paying too much attention to 4 widely recommended metrics.
Again, what is a good number of pages per session? Does 4.30 in the screenshot above mean that your organic traffic visitors participate less than those who come from paid traffic with 6.10? What should be the specific improvement action anyway? GA data won't tell you that. If you ask 10 SEOs what their top SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) are, you're likely to get 10 different answers. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that measures the profits each customer brings. Jeff had one more KPI he wanted to share, and this is Content Efficiency.
Content efficiency is a fascinating metric because it's about optimizing content not only for search engines, but also achieving the company's goals for that content. Average content teams create content that reaches 10% of their goals, 10% of their content succeeds. I get equipment that operates 40% or more, where 40% or more of its content reaches the intended objectives. That percentage defines good content teams.
By using content efficiency as a KPI, that's when people really start to want to improve their content strategy and make the transition to data-driven decision-making about what to create and what to update. Content efficiency is one of MarketMuse's main value propositions. You know what to build and how much you need to invest to make an impact. Kayle is an analytics and SEM consultant for B2B and e-commerce sites in the U.S.
UU. She shared about a KPI available in Google Analytics 4 that tracks user engagement with a website, something that can be difficult to measure accurately. The average engagement time tells us the average time the site was focused on the user's browser. That means that the user is most likely looking at it.
Most search ranking reports work with the old blue 10 link model. But, the search results are no longer 10 blue links, they have evolved. We know that ranking in “Position 1” is not what it used to be, so in our toolkit we also look at things that give us more information about ranking, such as “Pixels from the Top”. This is a Google Search Console metric that shows the average position of a keyword phrase in search results.
SEO metrics are data points or indicators that you must track and monitor to measure performance and maintain a healthy and optimized website. One of the reasons search engine optimization (SEO) is so effective is because you can track and measure everything. As you monitor individual pages on your site, another useful SEO metric to track is page speed. In a world of constant algorithm updates and changing SEO trends, it's important to know your SEO metrics.
Most SEO metrics track information such as authority scores, backlinks, page views, traffic data, and target keyword rankings. It's not a metric that you need to constantly track, but you need to set a regular cadence to complete an SEO audit. You don't want to put all that effort into understanding and optimizing your SEO metrics just to get users to leave your site because of a particular page. With this in mind, it's essential that you regularly monitor key SEO metrics to ensure that your site is healthy, properly optimized, and yields commercial benefits.
As an SEO professional, measuring the success of the work you do for your clients can be one of the most challenging parts of the job. This is essentially the SEO version of Share of Voice (SOV), one of the most important marketing KPIs that measures the visibility of your brand in the market. Not only does this mean that SEO is more important now than ever, but it also means that keeping track of your SEO and KPI metrics is even more relevant today. The “Enhancements” section of Google Search Console shows you how your site's pages are performing based on Core Web Vitals, and you can also use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to access these metrics and get recommendations for improving your site's performance.
Using an SEO metrics tool will help you monitor and track them all, which is key to identifying which strategies work and which don't. It's a key SEO metric that tells you if your SEO efforts are laying the foundation for a successful SEO program. . .
