What are SEO Metrics?
Tracking SEO Metrics is one of the most effective ways to see your business growth and progress.
How do you use SEO metrics to inform your SEO strategy? Haven’t ever thought of that, or you did, but just never understood how to go about it? Maybe you really don’t see the point, or do you simply find the idea of technical SEO Metrics intimidating?
The importance of monitoring the efficiency of your SEO strategy cannot be overemphasized.
It is essential to regularly review your SEO Metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), to ensure that your website is performing optimally and benefiting your business.
SEO metrics are a powerful strategy, but before diving into it, there are some important things you must do first.
- Map out your goals and objectives.
- Determine what SEO metrics strategy would be suitable to measure your website’s growth and success and,
- Be flexible in adding or modifying strategy and do frequent website audits in order to track your website’s SEO metrics.
Now, how often should you review your SEO metrics?
SEO is ever-growing and ever-changing. It is important to stay up-to-date on the ever-changing SEO landscape to ensure the growth and sustainability of your online presence.
As business owners, SEO specialists or marketers, and Site Administrators, you’re responsible for your or your client’s SEO rankings, and it goes without saying that you must frequently monitor said website.
SEO Industry pundits strongly recommend that you assess your keyword strategy every three months prior to launching any campaigns or promotions.
Doing so helps to maximize the impact of your SEO efforts. To maximize the impact of your SEO strategy, it is important to begin researching relevant search terms as soon as possible. This will help to ensure that your efforts are maximized the success.
So you can now understand why it’s crucial to regularly tack primary SEO metrics to ensure that your site is healthy, performing well, and beneficial business-wise.
What are SEO metrics, you ask?
They are also called key performance indicators (KPIs) or SEO KPI metrics and are values that measure website performance for organic search results.
SEO metrics measure SEO performance, which by implication means that engaging an SEO Metrics checker, must be a part of your SEO strategy.
In this article, you’ll get to see 12 key important metrics to track.
Digital marketing teams insist that no SEO strategy is complete without the following metrics:
1. TECHNICAL SEO SCORE
Regularly assessing your website’s Technical SEO score is essential for achieving and maintaining high rankings and organic traffic on Google.
Doing this ensures that your website is properly optimized and provides an easy and effective way for search engine spiders to crawl and index it. As a prudent website owner. SEO is not a one-time activity, and every SEO professional knows that.
As a prudent business owner with a website, you should know that too. Your technical SEO score is a high-priority SEO Metric to measure, and you must revisit it on a monthly basis.
Your score on a Technical SEO assessment is crucial because it indicates that your website is easily accessible, quickly crawled, and indexed by search engines like Googlebot.
Technical SEO issues can severely impede your website’s ability to generate organic traffic from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Without using an SEO score checker or a technical SEO audit tool, it can be difficult to identify these issues.
Even if your website features high-quality content, user experience, and mobile usability, it will not rank highly on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) if there are underlying technical problems.
2. ON-PAGE SEO SCORE
The importance of on-page SEO as a key metric for SEO cannot be over-emphasized. Google’s documentation on ‘How Search Works‘ further reiterates the significance of on-page SEO for ranking web pages.
If keywords appear on the page title, headings, or body of the text, the information is more likely to be relevant.
The above quote further emphasizes what SEO experts have been saying for years — keywords are a top-ranking factor for Google’s algorithm.
Running a monthly check of your on-Page is a proprietary metric that must be carried out to estimate the quality of your website’s page optimization. It also considers critical on-page errors and warnings detected on the page.
3. INDEXING AND CRAWLING
Crawling and indexing are the two essential steps of a search engine algorithm that allow search engines to create and maintain their databases, which they use to rank websites in SERPs and return search results.
It is important to track these two metrics regularly to prevent duplicate content, which can lead to link juice loss and a constrained crawl budget, both of which can have a negative effect on SEO traffic.
Without monitoring indexing and crawling technical SEO metrics, it’s difficult to detect issues such as crawling too few or too many links, as well as crawling errors, all of which can be costly mistakes.
4. DOMAIN AUTHORITY AND DOMAIN RATING
Another important metric for SEO is Domain Rating (DR). You may be clueless as to how Domain Rating impacts your SEO strategy… Here’s how.
DR domain-level SEO KPI Metrics whose score, ranging from 0 to 100, is taken into consideration by most integrated SEO tools. A website with a high Domain Rating (DR) score is likelier to have a higher ranking than a website with a lower DR score.
Increasing a score from 80 to 81 is more challenging than increasing it from 20 to 21. So, websites with higher authority scores have a better chance of ranking higher for search queries.
Though Google does not take DR into account when ranking websites, higher DR websites demonstrate more authority over lower.
If your website has a high DR and provides qualitative content to readers, it’s more likely to rank higher for various queries.
5. PAGE AUTHORITY AND URL RATING
One of the most important SEO Metrics to measure is Page Authority and URL Rating because it measures the SEO weight a specific web page carries in the eyes of a search engine while also acting as a ranking factor for your website’s URL.
This is indicated by a score of 100; with higher the number, the better the link profile of the page is. That is, the higher your rank on the scale, the stronger your page’s link profile is.
Multiple reasons exist why you should check your Page Authority with a rating checker. But most importantly, you want always to assess your Page Authority to see how your page is performing and take action if you notice your score dropping to prevent your rankings from dropping further.
6. KEYWORDS RANKING
You do not need a Shaman to tell you that there are thousands of reasons why Keyword ranking is a fundamental SEO Metric to measure. The biggest reason — your rank boosts Revenue!
Another reason is that it’s the best way to understand which keywords are generating the most traffic and profit. This will create room to optimize your campaigns and boost your ROI. To be honest, good rankings increase your business’ visibility.
And what about your competitors? Wouldn’t you like to know how their websites are performing? If you’re doing better than them?
Regularly tracking your keyword ranking metric helps you not only by increasing visibility, monitoring rank drops, and identifying keyword opportunities that will lead to higher returns on your investments, but it also keeps you in the know with your competitors.
Luckily for you, there are tools to track to help you track this.
7. BACKLINKS
Fact — Backlinks are important. The wrong backlinks can make or break your website. Backlinks have proven to be very helpful in bringing traffic to your website.
Tracking your backlinks’ SEO Metrics allows you to gain insight into how your strategy is performing and how it is impacting traffic, orders, engagements, rankings, and even revenue.
The wrong backlinks can have a negative effect on your website, so it is important to monitor your backlink’s SEO performance regularly. With the right backlinks, your website can reach its full potential.
All of this aside, Backlinks very well serve as a “vote of confidence” of some sort; as you generate more traffic with links, the authority of your domain goes up, and people are more trusting of your site and want to be associated with your brand.
8. CONTENT READABILITY SCORE
Still on the topic of Important SEO Metrics to measure, tracking your content readability score also makes the cut. You should always check your content’s readability score to measure the quality of your website’s content.
This helps you understand what level your visitors need to be at in order to comprehend your content.
Apart from meticulously writing your website content, you should always have your content readability scored.
If your readability score is high, then your content is understood by a large number of readers and vice versa. Therefore, it is important to score your content’s readability to ensure it is accessible to as many as possible.
9. RICH SNIPPETS
Rich snippets, now known as “Rich results,” are enhanced Google Search results. Rich Snippets are a useful tool in making the web user act, which leads to better click-through rates than standard snippets.
On average, they boost user reaction. Google adores rich snippets because they bolster its algorithms’ understanding of the purpose of individual pages. You now see why measuring rich snippets metrics should be part of your SEO strategy.
10. GOOGLE GA4- TRAFFIC SOURCES
Tracking Google Analytics 4 dimensions is an SEO performance Metric that will help you keep track of the following:
– Organic Traffic
Tracking organic search traffic for your website is a crucial aspect of understanding the performance of your website.
It is a fundamental SEO metric that indicates the effectiveness of your SEO efforts in developing a successful SEO strategy.
– New vs. Returning Users
Google Analytics identifies users based on the reporting identity selected in Admin, and GA4 SEO Metrics tracks the frequency and duration of engagement by new and returning users to websites or mobile apps.
Additionally, GA4 SEO Metrics measures the value of users by tracking the additional revenue generated after their first visit, thus highlighting the importance of users in digital analytics.
– Organic Conversions
Regarding Organic Conversions, GA4’s “conversions” metric allows you to track the number of times a user performed an action of value to your business on your website. By monitoring key user behaviors, you can gain valuable insights to help you maximize your ROI.
11. SEARCH CONSOLE- WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
Another SEO performance metric to measure is Google Search Console. Tracking this SEO metric will help with the following;
– Crawling Issues
Crawling errors occur when search engines have a problem downloading a specific URL. However, the Search Console shows you the number of crawl issues you get every day. So that we can identify the URL causing the error.
– Search Queries
You get to assess your website traffic based on impressions caused by clicks your link received from a Google search result, which is practically the entire basis upon which SEO campaigns are built.
12. GOOGLE MAP RESULTS – LOCAL SEO VISIBILITY
Do Google Map results help with Local SEO Visibility? Yes, it does.
Having to handle citations, on-page optimization, keyword research, and website structure in an environment that is constantly changing appears to be quite the chore, yet change is the one thing you can count on when it comes to local search results.
So you must track your Google Map results to know if you are adapting quickly to these changes.
CONCLUSION
Regular measurements of SEO KPI Metrics may sound a bit tedious, but worry not; with repetition and familiarity, you’d pretty much become a pro at tracking SEO Metrics to safeguard your SEO Strategy.
