SEO for any website requires constant effort to achieve the desired success.
A digital marketer or an SEO expert need to give a few months to see the results taking place in achieving higher website ranking.
Without monitoring the relevant keywords related to your website, it is difficult to know if your efforts are bringing any results or not.
This tracking also helps in timely optimizing the keywords to bring better conversion rates.
Monitoring keyword ranking has been the common way to understand and a popular way to see the results and changes brought by the SEO.
It is advisable that rather than depending on one kind of metric, marketers should monitor various other aspects of website data. There are various monitoring tools available that can be used.
Some of these tools are free to use, which is good for those who are just starting to work on SEO strategy, otherwise paid tools provide far more detailed information.
Google Analytics is one of them which comes under Google and is free to use. You can also check using Kissmetrics, another popular monitoring tool.
Below we will discuss a few top SEO metrics.
15 SEO metrics to monitor SEO Performance:
1. Understanding Keyword rankings:
Keyword ranking is a useful way to understand how website conversion is happening.
By using the right keyword, it helps to get a step ahead of your competitors, also, you will know which keyword is working for you and which of them may not be useful.
Few criteria which are considered while analyzing the keyword:
Targeting the right keywords:
You need to use the less competitive keywords for your blogs to achieve a better ranking in search.
Achieving a better ranking:
Over the period of the time, your keywords should reward you for achieving better search rankings, getting backlinks and higher conversion rates. If none of this is happening, it is time to review your plan
Getting new links:
Getting a new link to a certain page gives it more strength as compared to other web pages. If you see that some of your pages are not working well, then internal linking is the best option for use.
Tracking your keywords:
The best way to understand your keywords analysis is, that you select about 5 keywords in your post or a blog. These keywords will be the ones which you decided to focus on.
Rather than checking manually these keywords, there are many free tools that can be used for analysis. One such tool is Serpfox or you can even use Pro Rank Tracker.
These tools will provide you a fair idea of how your keywords are performing as in when compared to your competitors and on Google search.
Since these are free tools, therefore, results and information provided by them will be limited when compared to the paid tools.
2. Achieving backlinks:
Achieving backlinks through authoritative domains should be an essential part of your SEO plan.
Ensure to get quality backlinks by planning link building campaigns, which should have good quality and quantity.
The importance of tracking backlinks regularly is given below:
Know the cost per link:
Achieving a quality link should be understood from the fact that it should be profitable in nature. For example, if you are spending $500 on a link, then it may not be a profitable link to use.
Monitoring links for a single link:
It is important to measure and monitor the success of each backlink that you get. Know if a certain link has worked better than others and what could be the possible reason for the same.
Building a relationship:
Networking for the link building online is an effective way. If you see someone linking to your website, then it is good to connect with them and find other opportunities to get the backlink.
Tracking the backlinks:
Ahrefs and MajesticSEO are the two best tools to track the backlinks. Their free version has limited features as compared to the paid ones, but if you are starting new, then these will be good to go with.
The important aspect is to know the quality of links that you are getting.
Higher the score of the backlink, higher the quality of it. The quality links matter than the quantity, to achieve the higher search engine ranking.
3. Achieving organic search traffic:
The usage of working on SEO is to get organic search traffic. Ensure to regularly track the organic traffic growth for your website.
You can see the growth or decrease every month, analyze this traffic change depending on the seasonal changes that may occur.
4. Average time spent on the page:
Another important metric that is used to measure the success of the page is the average time, that people spend on your landing page.
When analyzing this, you will observe a certain trend that the audience spend time on your page, where you can understand the benchmark to set for your site.
Google Analytics is the best tool by Google to find out the average time the user is spending on your website. It helps you to track the details, as per geography, demographics and gender-based.
As per the analysis is done, you can accordingly create the content and get more traction on your website.
5. Pages per visitor:
For a new site, a low number of visitors is not bad, to begin with.
But over a period of time with your strategic SEO plan, the number of visitors coming to your page should eventually increase. There are two ways to get better pages per visitor:
• Internal linking works best, as the user will be able to go from one page to another.
• Use your sidebar with links, with interesting topics.
6. Returning visitors:
Having a loyal visitor base is an important metric to show your successful SEO strategy.
Moreover, it means that your content is good and people are interested in reading it.
By using Google Analytics, you can track your returning visitors on your website. Keep a track of returning visitors every month and see the growth or dip that maybe be taking place.
At least 20% of your traffic should be made of returning visitors.
7. Bounce rate:
Measuring a bounce rate is slightly tricky because it may indicate that people visit your website and leave, which may not be a good indicator for you.
Another reason being that the user may be going back and forth on your website pages and maybe just searching for the topic of interest, then it is not a bad indicator at all.
The user might be leaving the page altogether which is fine but if they are clicking back button, then it is not a good sign since it is hard to track back clicking information.
You can analyze the bounce rate by using Google Analytics, wherein if the content is good then the bounce rate will be less than 50%.
8. Page loading speed:
Google appreciates a webpage which loads quickly, as it is an effective strategy to give the user a better experience.
If your page takes lots of time in loading, then all your metrics will fail no matter how good is the SEO strategy.
You can test the speed of your page by using tools like GTmetrix or Pingdom. You need to paste the URL link to your website in the bar and it will show you the loading speed of your page.
It shows you the complete detail of the pages on the basis of high or low priority which requires your attention to improve it.
9. Crawl errors:
Crawlers are those small algorithms by Google, which needs to go through your entire website content to understand its quality.
If these crawlers are not able to read your pages, then it is time to fix it as it will affect your Google ranking.
There can be hundreds or thousands of crawl errors on your website and it will take ample amount of time to fix it.
Ensure to fix your crawl errors as soon as possible because this may lead your pages to get de-indexed.
Once these crawl errors are fixed it will have a huge impact on the functioning of your entire website and on your search ranking.
10. Monitoring traffic as per the device:
Mobile devices have become the biggest source where people visit the website. Hence, having a responsive website will help you get a better ranking.
You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check if your website is mobile friendly or not. Having a mobile-friendly site leads to successful and higher conversion rates.
Also, check the metrics like bounce rate and pages per view for mobile to understand if they are good to go.
A mobile-friendly site is necessary for your user to interact with your website, the lack of which will lead to no or lesser conversions of your website.
11. Analyze your site health:
It is important to know the number of pages that have been indexed from your site.
You can see and analyze this from the webmaster tools and see the reasons for it being de-indexed to get it fixed.
12. 404 page views:
If your user is landing on an error page, then it is not a good sign and you may end up losing your visitor.
Having an error-free page is a sign of unhealthy website, which will lower your ranking in Google search engine.
13. Conversion rate:
Achieving higher traffic is a good sign but the better is the number of clicks or conversion your website is getting. These conversions are what you have been working for.
Hence, create a goal on Google Analytics for the number of clicks that you are looking to achieve for your website or a specific page.
This will give you a fair idea about the necessary changes that you may need to take.
Experimenting with the content will help you know what works for you to get the conversion done.
For example, if there is a trending topic or an event, then you can incorporate that topic into your content to get higher traffic which will lead to a higher conversion rate.
Understanding the rate of conversion will help you to know how much and where you need to invest to achieve the conversions.
14. Track your exit pages:
An exit page is one from where your user is leaving the website.
Understanding the top exit pages gives you information whether there is a concern with a specific page or content that requires being worked on.
You can then work on these specific pages to ensure that the user stays longer and take some action on it.
15. Tracking the traffic from different search engines:
Google is definitely the most popular search engine used. But there are some users, who prefer Bing over Google while making a certain search query.
It is good to consider Bing also in your SEO strategy, because even if you see the ratio of traffic coming from there is small, it may lead to higher conversions.
Monitoring this SEO metric is of utmost importance because this is what will show you the effort that you are putting into to achieve the success of conversion. This also allows you to know where and how much you need to invest the money into it.
Understanding the metrics may not be a fun job to do but it is important for your business strategies to work. It is good to plan up your weekly and monthly schedules to ensure that you regularly track your SEO metrics.
Compare these metrics on weekly., quarterly and yearly basis as this will provide you the relevant information about the growth and changes that may be happening.
Tracking this information will give you insight and reasons for the spike and dips in the metrics.
Monitoring metrics is a constant effort to achieve the best results for future business.