SEO metrics are vital in understanding the growth and areas of improvement for your SEO campaigns. By using metrics and analyzing SEO data sets, you can learn if your website’s search ranking is improving for a specific search term or if website traffic to a particular page is going up or down, and use these insights to optimize your SEO performance.
Here are five SEO metrics businesses should use:
SEO Search Ranking
The most important SEO metric you should use to measure your SEO performance is your website’s search ranking. After all, the main goal of implementing SEO initiatives for your website is increasing your website’s search rankings for search terms related to your business.
To monitor and analyze your website’s search rankings, there are a few SEO tools you can use. The most popular ones include Google Search Console (GSC) and SEMRush. These tools let you see your website’s search rankings for specific search queries. For example, if you’re a Vancouver law firm, you can use GSC or SEMRush to see your current or past search ranking for a search term such as “Vancouver lawyers” or “Vancouver law firms” and see if your website’s search ranking is trending upwards or downwards.
Landing Page Visits
You can also use GSC or Google Analytics 4 (GA) to see on which webpages your organic visitors are landing within your website. You can also see if organic traffic to these webpages is increasing or decreasing, and then determine if you need to make adjustments to your SEO approach. For example, if you find out that organic traffic for one of your main service pages is decreasing, you can check in Google Search Console whether the webpage’s search ranking has dropped over time. If the webpage’s search ranking hasn’t dropped and remains high on Google search results for targeted search terms, the decline in organic traffic to a service webpage could be due to lower demand for the service offered in it, which leads to fewer online searches and less organic traffic. In this case, you can engage in SEO for another service page that’s more in-demand and has a higher online search volume.
Conversions and Conversion Rate
Conversion is a meaningful action taken on your site. For an eCommerce website, that might be sales. For non-eCommerce websites such as service-based businesses, a conversion can be a contact form submission, download or other actions.
Conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by a given number of sessions or users. For example, if there are 100 sessions and 1 conversion, the conversion rate is 1%. You can use conversion rate to understand the quality of the organic traffic and of your website content. For example, if your organic traffic conversion rate is 0.01%, there’s definitely room to improve the quality of organic traffic (e.g. generate visitors who are more interested in your service) or website content (e.g. write content that explains your service better and entice your audience to convert on your website).
Content Engagement
You can use GA4 to measure your organic visitors’ content engagement, such as website clicks, scroll depth, engagement time, file downloads and video plays. Measuring your organic visitors’ content engagement helps you understand if you’re delivering content in which your audience is interested or bringing in organic traffic that’s interested in your content or services. A lot of different data segmentation can be performed for this type of analysis to better understand your audience; the insights will help you generate more quality organic traffic and website content.
Newsletter Signups
Most organic website visitors aren’t ready to purchase or contact your business after visiting your website for the first time or even after a few times. However, many website visitors will sign up to your newsletter to stay up-to-date about your business and purchase from your business when they are ready. Hence, it’s important to track the number of newsletter signups that your organic traffic is generating to determine the effectiveness of your SEO campaign in attracting new newsletter signups.
Measuring your SEO performance using the above metrics is important in understanding your SEO results and finding opportunities of improvement. If you have any questions about the above tips or about your current SEO strategy or results, please feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
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