In today’s digital era, technology is growing rapidly. And in that environment, SEO and content marketing strategies are the key drivers of marketing success.
Measuring SEO performance is often easier said than done. Of course, you’ll be able to master this practice with a lot of time, effort, and most importantly, patience.
However, once you figure out how to measure SEO performance, you will be able to generate more leads, attract audiences’ attention, spread brand awareness, and increase conversion rates.
Therefore, every marketer should prioritize measuring SEO performance as one of the critical success factors.
With SEO metrics, you can use data to evaluate and review your SEO strategy’s effectiveness. In addition, there are still many essential parts or components that fall within typical SEO efforts.
Five Important SEO Metrics to Monitor
Here are the top five SEO metrics every marketer should know:
1. Organic Traffic
In every marketing strategy, whether it’s a content marketing or social media like TikTok marketing, driving traffic is essential.
Organic traffic, i.e. “free” visits sent by search engines like Google, is the most important SEO metric to keep tabs on. After all, this is the entire purpose of search engine optimization!
Don’t mistake organic traffic for visits from paid ads or referrals. These visitors search Google, see your listing on the results page, find it relevant, and choose to click through to your domain.
There are many was to boost organic traffic. Great content, like explainer videos, is tops on the list for driving improvements with organic search traffic.
In this first metric, look for steady increases in organic sessions. Don’t despair if you see slow progress, even if it appears nothing is happening at first. SEO takes time and patience.
Measure your traffic over time, perhaps monthly or even annually, to get the best information about whether or not your efforts are paying off.
2. Click Through Rate (CTR)
Although CTR (Click-through rate) is a ranking factor, the higher your organic CTR, the more people will click on your listing on the search engine results page.
The value of this organic CTR is something you should track, both at the page level and at the query level.
CTR is a direct metric that shows the percentage of people who visit your page after they have performed a search that resulted in an impression. The higher the CTR, the better!
You need to check this to determine how relevant your title tags and meta descriptions are to your snippets (elements that appear in the SERP) or snippets with a particular query.
Compare how others on the same SERP are doing it, and adjust to get ahead of them.
Better optimization will lead to better CTRs across the board. Monitor this metric and make changes if it starts to lose momentum.
3. Keyword Ranking
All organic traffic starts with a search. Users start with questions or keywords, and your content needs to be the most relevant to their searches if you want to show up atop the SERPs.
So find good keywords, but keep in mind that this is not a simple process. You want to target keywords with a lot of searches that are relevant to your business.
You’ll also want to analyze one of the keyword difficulty metrics to ensure you are targeting keywords that you have a real chance to rank for.
Next, get to optimizing all of the content on your domain! Vary it up, using different formats in tandem such as blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.
For example, try embedding YouTube videos on your landing page, and then adding a top keyword in the tag title to help better rank your content.
In keyword ranking metrics, these selected keywords should be able to increase the ranking of your website. If it’s not appearing, then there is a possibility that you need to fix your SEO strategy.
In this case, you can check the performance of keywords using one of many quality SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, etc. This practice is the first step to identifying the right approach, optimizing content, and getting yourself ranked.
4. Conversion Rates
SEO is great for driving traffic. But if you fail to convert those visitors into customers, your business won’t last very long.
Of course, more traffic offers you more opportunities to convert visitors. But traffic alone won’t cut it. If you can maintain or improve solid conversion rates, you stand to close more business with or with out the additional visitors.
Do keep in mind that this isn’t just about revenue and closed sales. Conversions can fall at any stage of the buyer’s journey.
Don’t underestimate the future potential of a simple opt in — email sign-ups, service subscriptions, premium content downloads, and other conversion types can drive real business value if handled properly.
You can track conversion growth in Google Analytics by accessing the Admin button and then setting up Conversion Goals.
Here are some types of conversion goals to achieve:
- Revenue
- Acquisition
- Engagement
- Inquiry
5. Backlinks and Referring Domains
Backlinks and referring domains are essential factors for SEO ranking. In a study of more than 11 million Google search results, Backlinko found that the number of referring domains has a strong correlation to SEO performance.
As an underappreciated but very important piece of the SEO puzzle, your off page results need to be on your radar. This includes total backlinks as well as referring domains, meaning the number of unique websites linking to you.
You need more referring domains to boost your own domain authority. And higher domain authority helps you rank better. It’s all connected, and very, very important to your success.
But you don’t want to go out and spam a bunch of terrible quality websites with backlinks pointing at your own domain. You want quality and relevant links.
You’ll see much faster progress with strong links from websites in your own niche, as opposed to a ton of low authority links all over the web.
Any decent SEO tracking tool will include backlink reporting. If you opt to sign on for one, be absolutely sure this is a key feature they offer. If not, move to another tool that does include it.
Conclusion
If you want to understand how well your search engine optimization efforts are working, you need to track these key SEO metrics.
Some of them will be more suitable to measuring overall progress, while others may be useful down at a campaign or business unit level.
You should measure both as needed. As a simple rule of thumb: Choose SEO metrics based on your project goals and marketing campaign objectives.
Good luck getting ranked atop your most coveted SERPs. Measure along the way, adjust as needed, and watch the organic traffic start to flow into your website!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Feature Image Sourced via Creative Commons (4.0 Attribution Required) from Pexels.com user: Negative Space
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Andre Oentoro
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