Several SEO metrics are more important than ranking on the first page of Google. If you can identify and monitor these correctly, you increase your chances of reaching the top positions and enjoying all the benefits.
Many people think of SEO as about getting high rankings for particular keywords, and while this is not entirely false, it is not entirely true either.
SEO is about making your website easier for search engines to discover and understand and friendlier to users. If you do this using best practices, SEO will eventually work, and you will gain higher rankings.
Why metrics are more important for SEO than rankings?
To measure progress or lack of it: To say it simply, if you don’t measure SEO, then there is no way to know if what you are doing is working or not. When doing SEO work for a website, it will not magically go from page 5 to page 1 of the SERPS, but the improvement will come gradually. That’s why it is necessary to measure and be able to identify progress.
To justify your SEO investment - SEO costs a lot of money, and nobody likes to spend without getting a return. Even if you decide not to outsource SEO but do it yourself (or internally if you are a business), you are still spending valuable time that has a monetary value.
SEO Metrics can tell you if your money on SEO and digital marketing is worth it.
To motivate you to keep improving your website or blog: Digital marketers spend endless hours in front of a computer screen trying to promote web properties online, and until you get the results you want, it’s easy to get disappointed and quit. Metrics can tell you if you are moving in the right direction and motivate you to keep going.
Key SEO Metrics Explained
One of the main differences between doing business on the Internet and doing business offline is that on the Internet, everything can be measured with great accuracy. From site visits to button clicks and conversions, the figures you have at your disposal for analysis are endless.
If you try to analyze and understand them all, you will lose focus on what is important to know, enabling you to make the correct decisions for your digital marketing campaigns.
To save you time, I will outline below the 5 most useful SEO metrics you should monitor daily.
1. Average Google Rankings
You want your website to rank for various keywords on the first page of Google, correct? This way, you will get traffic and make business (i.e., conversions). That’s the long-term plan, but until you get there, you have to work your way to the top.
The best and most free way to monitor your Google ranking positions is to use the ‘Search Analytics’ tool, available under ‘Search Traffic’ in ‘Google Search Console.’
‘Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools)’ is a free tool provided by Google to webmasters. It gives you details on how your website ranks in Google search.
The first step is to register and verify your website with the Search Console and then navigate to the ‘Search Analytics report.’
By default, the report shows the queries people typed in the Google search box and the number of clicks they received, i.e., the number of visits to your website for that term.
You want to see the average ranking position for those keywords, and you can do that by selecting the ‘Position’ checkbox, as shown above.
A nice feature of the tool is that it allows you to compare your rankings positions for the last 7 days or the last 28 days. You can do that by selecting one of the options under ‘Comparison’ in the ‘Dates’ radio button.
You can apply many other filters to the data to refine your results, such as device type (desktop, mobile, tablet), countries, or even the type of search (web search, image search, or video search), but for SEO metrics purposes, you can concentrate on the average position.
One thing to note about ‘Search Analytics’ is that the data is available only for the last 90 days. If you need more than that, export the data every three months and keep it in an Excel file.
How to use the average position statistics
What is important to monitor when viewing your average ranking position is to find out for which keywords you are improving over time and also to spot which keywords are closer to <10 average ranking position (each Google search results page has 10 positions, so if rank for a keyword on position 15, then this means you are on page 2).
These are the keywords (click on the keyword to see which page is ranking for the particular keyword) that can generate more Google traffic for your website in the short term.
To strengthen those pages, you can use internal links and promote them on social media.
2. Organic Traffic Changes
When you check your Google Analytics reports to see how many visits you received, you will notice that you have visits from spammy websites that make no sense. These ‘fake’ visits are not real people who visited your website; they are ‘page requests’ from software programs.
They do this for various reasons, which I am not going to waste time discussing; what you should do to evaluate if your traffic increases over time is to monitor visits coming from organic search, i.e., people that used Google, Yahoo, or other search engines to search for something and ended up in your website.
You can view this by looking at the ‘Organic Search’ report under ‘Acquisition / All Traffic / Channels’ in Google Analytics.
Ideally, you want to see these numbers in the report, but because SEO takes time, what is more important is to experience a steady increase in organic visits. Use the date picker (top right of the screen) to select a range of 2-3 months and analyse how your organic traffic changed over that time.
If you consistently work on your website but don’t see an increase (at least a small one), then something is wrong, and you may need to change your SEO tactics.
On the other hand, if you notice big fluctuations in traffic (either positive or negative), you need to investigate further. Maybe you were hit by a Google penalty, which resulted in traffic loss, or you have recovered from a penalty, which is why your traffic increased suddenly.
3. Bounce rate
Regardless of your website type, your goal is to keep visitors to your web pages and site longer. If people leave as soon as they enter your website, this is not good for them, it’s not good for SEO, and it will not help you achieve your business goals.
The bounce rate value tells you exactly this: the percentage of people who navigated away from your website without visiting a second page. The lower the bounce rate of a page, the better.
How can you use this metric?
Use it in conjunction with the organic traffic report to find out which pages of your website have a high bounce rate. Change these pages to reduce the bounce rate and keep visitors on your website longer.
5. Conversions / Event Tracking
One of the nice things about Google Analytics is that it allows you to add and monitor website goals easily. As I have mentioned many times, all types of websites have goals, whether this is a sale of a product or service, visits to a particular page, clicks on ads, or signups to a newsletter.
You need to identify your website’s goals and create them in analytics. By doing so, you will know how many conversions you had, the origin of these conversions (organic traffic, direct traffic, email, etc), and in some cases, the value of the conversion (this is mainly applicable for ecommerce stores).
A few things to note about conversion tracking:
- This feature must be used even if you are not selling a product. If none of the above applies to you, use it to track visits to your most important pages. It will help you better understand your website and audience.
- You can create several goals in analytics, including button clicks (known as Event tracking). This can be very useful when you want to see which buttons get clicked from a page with more than one button that leads to your sales page.
Don’t forget that a well-optimized website can meet its business goals with less traffic than a non-optimized website with a lot of traffic. For example, if you get 100 targeted visits per day and 10 of them convert, this is better than having a website that gets 10,000 visits per day and only 20 conversions.
In other words, while it is good to always think of ways to get your website noticed, it is also recommended that you analyze your current traffic and find ways to increase conversions. As your traffic increases, you will be in a much better position.
5. Popular Pages / Visits per page
Another useful metric you can monitor daily is your popular pages and visits per page. You can view this report in Google Analytics under ‘Behaviour / Site Content / All Pages’.
This report shows the pages of your website that get the most visits and views per day (popular pages) and the visit statistics per page. You can use this data to understand what people read while on your website and find ways to improve the page content and conversions.
For example, if most of your visits go to a certain page and only a few click to visit your ‘sales pages’, you can either make the ‘call to action’ more visible on that page (by adding a bigger style button, for example) or use an exit popup to grab their attention when they leave or a customized widget for the sidebar of that page, etc.
There are many opportunities to improve a page and conversions, provided that you do it in a controlled manner by running A/B tests.
Conclusion and final thoughts
It is normal to want your website to rank higher in the SERPS, but getting there takes a lot of time and work. In the meantime, besides working on your website’s content and promotion, you also need to closely monitor the 5 SEO metrics explained above to have enough data to make the correct decisions for your business.
Are there any missing important metrics that you need to monitor daily?
