Measuring the results of any marketing campaign is imperative as this helps in improving it further. Marketers often track and analyze the progress of their digital efforts to give them deeper insights into what works and what does not. SEO or search engine optimization is an important aspect of any digital strategy which also needs to be measured.
Any business with a website needs SEO to help them be more visible on Google’s results page. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quantity and quality of traffic flowing to your website organically. Utilizing SEO techniques can help you reach the right target audience. Like other marketing strategies, SEO activities should also be measured. These insights can refine your strategies and improve your overall SEO efforts.
Let’s take a look at all the important metrics that can help measure SEO results.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is an important metric to track for your SEO efforts. It is the traffic that comes to your website without you paying for it. Your webpage appears organically on the search engine results page for a particular keyword. Tracking your organic traffic over time can show you insights into your SEO performance. Increase in visitors through organic traffic indicates that your ranking is improving gradually.
It is important to keep monitoring this metric so that you know your SEO strategies are giving you results. Organic traffic gives you the number of visitors coming to your website through organic channels. The quality of the traffic depends on which keywords your website is ranking for. When looking into organic traffic, dive deeper and look at the landing pages and location.
Landing pages can show you which pages are gaining more traffic, and which are not. You can improve your SEO efforts for the pages that are not gaining more traffic. Location can show you if this traffic is coming from the location that you are targeting for your business. To measure the success of your SEO strategies, this metric should be measured along with others. Organic traffic alone cannot give you an in-depth insight into your SEO success.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate shows you how many percentages of visitors landed on your page and exited without taking any action. This metric is often related to determining the quality of a landing page and user experience. A high bounce rate indicates that the majority of users are leaving without engaging. From an SEO perspective, it could mean that the content on the landing page is not relevant to the keyword used by the user. Keep a track of this metric to see whether the users are engaging with your content or not.
Conversion Rate
Organic traffic determines the number of users coming to your website, it does not show you if they took any actions. To understand how many people actually completed an action on your website, you need to look into conversion rate. Look into the conversion rate for organic traffic to see how many visitors have taken the desired actions. These actions can be anything like newsletter sign ups, eBook downloads, form submissions etc. It contributes to the goals of your business.
Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by the number of unique visits. Measuring conversion rate for organic traffic helps you gauge the return on investment from your organic channels. This means that your SEO efforts are contributing to your profits. If you have a low conversion rate you can plan on improving your existing SEO strategies.
Organic Traffic Source
Google is a widely used search engine, but many people also prefer using other search engines like Bing or Yahoo. While monitoring your organic traffic take a look at Source, to examine which search engines your visitors are using. If you have a significant number of visitors coming from search engines other than Google, you will need to update your SEO strategy accordingly. Optimize your SEO strategies for the other search engines as they have the potential to bring you more visitors.
Click-through Rate (CTR)
Although this metric is more commonly associated with pay-per-click campaigns, it is also useful in determining your SEO efforts. CTR from search results to a particular page determines the percentage of users who clicked on your page from search results. Google Search Console offers a Search Analytics report that can show you this metric. This metric shows you how well your pages rank in the search results page. This gives you an opportunity to see how well optimized your page title and meta description is. If you have a low CTR you can start by optimizing your webpage.
Keyword Rankings
Keyword ranking can show you how your website ranks for a particular keyword. Tools like SEMrush or Serpstat can help you analyze the keywords your website ranks for. With these insights you can update your existing SEO strategy. If your website ranks higher for certain keywords, you can continue using them in your campaigns and content.
If your website ranks in the top 10 positions for some keywords, ensure that you use them in your content strategy. The keywords are more likely to bring traffic to your website.
Number of Backlinks
The number of backlinks your website has is useful in determining its domain authority. Backlinks are hyperlinks from other websites which link back to your website. Backlinks can also be links from other pages on your website. Link building is an important element of SEO. Google looks at the backlinks coming to your website to determine the credibility of your website. If other websites are referring to you, it means that your content is valuable and useful.
Along with looking at the volume of your backlinks, also look at their quality. Links from high-ranking websites have the ability to increase your own ranking. If you have low backlink volume, you can start improving your link building efforts to get links from credible sources.
Want to start building your link building strategy? Click here to find out more about various link building startegies you can leverage for your website.
Indexed Pages in Google Search Console
Indexed pages are the pages on a website that have been analyzed by a search engine and added to its database. If your pages are not indexed, then the search engine is not going to find them and display them in the search results. Hence, it is important to monitor the number of pages on your website that are indexed. If only a few of the webpages you submitted are indexed, you would need to manually request indexing through Search Console.
Crawlability Issues
Search engines often encounter problems crawling a website. This is a very common technical SEO error. If Googlebot is unable to crawl and index your site properly it might not display your pages in the search results. Even though your SEO strategy is on point, this error will hinder it. Visitors won’t be able to see your web pages. Hence, it is important to monitor regularly if your website is crawlable. Analyze these issues and find out if you are inadvertently blocking Googlebot or Bingbot through your robots.txt file.
Duplicate Page Titles & Meta Descriptions
The title tag is an important part of on-page SEO, as it helps both users and search engines understand what content the page provides. If you have multiple pages with similar titles or descriptions it can make it difficult for search engines to determine which page is relevant to a search query. This can lead to keyword cannibalization, meaning multiple pages on your website will be competing for the same keywords and sabotaging each other’s rankings.
Google Search Console can help you check the number of duplicate titles or descriptions on your site. You can fix these errors manually or take the help of a developer to set unique page titles and descriptions.
Monitor these metrics regularly and check for common errors. This will help you ensure the success of your search engine optimization strategies.
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