SEO (search-engine-optimization) is the practice of getting web pages to rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPS). It mainly focuses on getting things to rank on Google because other search engines have much lower traffic. There are multiple different things that make up an SEO strategy. To measure them, you need to understand SEO metrics. This guide will look at the nine most important SEO metrics.
Before you can understand the different SEO metrics, you need to know what SEO metrics are. SEO metrics are the different ways of measuring the success of a particular web page. For example, you could measure how many visitors are coming to the page on any given day. Or you could measure how many of those visitors are converting into a sale. However, just measuring one metric isn’t enough. You need to measure them all in tandem to get an idea of how successful an SEO strategy is. Here are the most important SEO metrics.
Organic traffic is (arguably) the most important SEO metric. It measures how many people are visiting a web page organically. Visiting a page organically means that they are typing something into a search engine and then clicking on your web page. If you have low organic traffic, it’s probably because the web page isn’t ranking highly for any of its targeting keywords. If you have a lot of organic traffic, the web page is ranking highly. The reason it’s the most important SEO metric is that it shows you how successful your overall campaign is. The more organic traffic a web page gets, the more successful the strategy.
Keywords are at the heart of every successful SEO strategy. A keyword is what someone searches to find your website. For example, if you sell specialist car parts for Ford, your main keyword might be ‘specialist Ford car parts’. Then, you will have a bunch of more niche keywords like ‘front grille for ford ranger 2014’.
Picking the right keywords is essential to be successful at SEO. To do this, you need to perform keyword research and find the most commonly searched phrases. Then, pick a keyword that you can realistically rank for. Finally, you will need to track the keywords to see if you are ranking for them or not. This process is relatively complicated, so you might need to outsource your marketing services to a professional SEO agency.
Conversion rate is one of the most important long-term SEO metrics. A conversion is when a visitor completes the action that you want them to complete – like buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, or filling in a form. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a web page that completes the action. You can have thousands of people visiting a web page every day, but none of them completing the action.
The Click-through rate is different from the conversion rate (although they are often confused). The click-through rate refers to the percentage of people that clicked on your ad to visit a website or landing page. When you are running a PPC ad campaign, you need to closely monitor the click-through rate because it tells you how attractive the ad is. Then, you need to measure the conversion rate to determine how many people complete the action after clicking.
Backlinks are extremely important to SEO because they are the foundation of Google’s PageRank algorithm. A backlink is created every time another web page links to your web page. For example, if someone writes a blog post and links to your web page. The more high-quality backlinks a page has, the higher it will rank in Google. This is because Google’s algorithm determines that if a page has high-quality content on it, other sites will link to it. As your web page climbs up the search engine results pages (SERPs), the more backlinks it will get. You can also build backlinks by writing guest posts, adding your page to directories, and asking other pages to link to you.
DA (domain authority) is the metric that search engines use to determine the trustworthiness of a site. It is measured from 1 to 100 – the higher the number, the more trustworthy. You should pay too much attention to this SEO metric as a way to climb the rankings because it will get higher naturally as the rest of your SEO strategy is put into place. However, it’s a good indication of the long-term success of your strategy.
Engagement metrics tell you about the behavior of a website visitor. For example, how long they stay on the site, where they go next, where they come from. The most important engagement metrics are bounce rate, time on site, and pages per visit. You will need a solid grasp of all of these metrics to fully understand what your users are doing on your web page.
Speed is super important to internet users. Think about it – how many times have you closed a website because it was taking too long to close? If a website is full of un-optimized images and videos, it will take ages to load, causing visitors to look elsewhere. You can measure the speed of your website by looking at page speed. This will also give you ways to improve the page speed until it loads up instantly.
The exit page is the last page that a visitor looked at before leaving. It can tell you a lot about the functionality of your website. If a lot of your website visitors are leaving on a specific page, there’s a good chance that there is something wrong with that page. This could be something simple like images taking too long or not being optimized for mobile. To work out why people are leaving the website on that page, you need to follow the user’s journey and look out for potential red flags. Then, you can fix any problems and provide a reason for users to stay on the site. Finally, you can see if the exit page metric changes.