SEO metrics are indications that can assist you to figure out if your SEO strategy is working. Some are necessary, others are beneficial, and still, others are only vanity metrics that will not assist you in making better judgments. How can you tell which ones are which, though? Here’s where you’ll discover the answers. If you ask SEOs what statistics they pay the most attention to, it’s almost certainly organic traffic. That’s a no-brainer, right? In most situations, though, it isn’t a reliable predictor of SEO performance without further information.
Indeed, you should never rely on a single statistic without first understanding what it means.
So let’s start with the complexities of organic traffic:
Organic Traffic:
All non-paid hits from search engines are referred to as organic traffic. If your organic traffic is increasing, it may indicate that your SEO consultant Brisbane efforts are paying off. However, unless you monetize your website visitors by showing advertising, more organic traffic does not always imply more sales.
Google Search Console’s Performance tab will offer you the most realistic picture of your organic traffic over time:
If you do not utilize Search Console (and you should! ), Site Explorer in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) can give you an approximate idea for free:
Keywords Ranking:
The organic ranking positions of a website in the search results for certain keywords are referred to as keyword rankings. You are more concerned about ranking highly for some keywords than others. In general, the more important a term is to your product or business, the more beneficial it is to score high for it. Keeping track of your keyword rankings helps you to track your SEO performance over time for your most essential phrases.
Get a third-party rank tracking tool like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker for the most exact findings. Create a project for your website, provide a list of keywords for which you’d want to track your rankings, and you’re ready to start.
Regular email notifications regarding the development of your tracked keywords are available, or you can just review the Rank Tracker reports regularly:
Search Visibility:
The proportion of all clicks for your monitored keywords that arrive on your website is known as search visibility. It’s the SEO equivalent of Share of Voice (SOV), one of the most significant marketing KPIs for determining your brand’s market presence.
The connection between SOV and market share is significant. In general, the greater your SOV, the larger your slice of the pie will be. Furthermore, because it is a relative statistic, it is a better KPI than organic traffic increase.
In Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker, paste a representative sample of keywords that important to you. If you’ve done your keyword research, you should have these keywords handy. It’s important to note that these are the core keywords that include what your target audience is looking for (don’t worry about long-tails). This extends keyword tracking from where it was before to a new level.
Then, on the Competitors overview tab, look at the Visibility column:
That is all there is to it. Because you always have direct business competitors, regardless of your company type, SERP visibility is a fantastic KPI for everyone.
Traffic Value:
The worth of your traffic is the amount you’d spend for all of your organic clicks if they came from PPC search advertisements. The greater the value of your traffic, the more important organic traffic becomes for your company.
While SEO should be used to increase traffic throughout the customer lifecycle, the most value clicks come from those who are likely to convert shortly. As a result, you’ll notice a lot of search advertisements for “money keywords” like “top SEO agency London” but none for “what is SEO.”
Increased traffic value is also a good indicator of improved SEO effectiveness. It’s considerably more difficult to rank for “money keywords” and receive more traffic from them than it is to rank for keywords that people search for but don’t intend to buy anything. In Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you may examine the total traffic statistics of any sphere:
However, you may delve even further into the worth of a page’s traffic. To see your most significant links, visit the Top Pages report in Site Explorer and arrange your pages by their traffic worth:
Organic Traffic Conversions:
Checking out, joining up, or registering for service are examples of essential activities that visitors take on your website. Most firms currently track them for all of their traffic sources, including organic traffic. The easiest approach to link your marketing efforts to income is to use conversion monitoring. When it comes to SEO KPIs, this is the one that everyone believes is the most important.
Even if you don’t know how to code, conversion tracking is typically simple to put up. The most essential thing is to make sure you’re tracking the correct conversions. If you run an eCommerce business, the number of conversions, their worth, and your average order value is the most important metrics to track. However, you’ll need to enable Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics to do so. It stands to reason to track leads, trial customer acquisition, purchased subscriptions, and ultimately each tier of new subscribers if you sell subscription-based software as we do.
Despite the conversions you’re measuring, there are some points to bear in mind:
The data from Google Analytics is biased in one direction or the other. By convention, Google Analytics assigns conversions to the most recent traffic source. That doesn’t take into account how SEO or most other marketing channels influence conversions. It is extremely critical for firms with seasonal revenue fluctuations to evaluate periods that make sense to analyze.
Gathering GA data correctly, making sense of it, and applying it to improve your SEO performance are all complicated issues that are outside the scope of this article.
Referring Domains:
Web pages that connect to yours are known as referring domains. Backlinks are among the most significant Google ranking criteria, and referring domains and organic traffic have a definite positive correlation:
To put it another way, you want to make sure you’re receiving more referring domains over time since this will almost certainly lead to increased organic search traffic. As a result, an increasing trend in referring domains indicates that your link-building, public relations, and branding initiatives are on track. Look for the referring domains graph in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer after plugging in your domain:
Even if there is a strong link, a single graph may not always indicate your SEO success. You must ensure that the websites that link to you are legitimate. In the Referring Domains report, you may do so:
Indexed Pages:
This informs you how many pages (or, more precisely, URLs) are in a search engine’s index. To appear in SERPs and create organic traffic, your pages must first be indexed, but you’ll also want to keep some sites out of the index.
In general, when you post new material, you want to see the number of indexed pages constantly increase. Any significant fluctuations in the number are most likely the result of a technical SEO problem. This measure becomes increasingly significant for you as your website grows in size and complexity. Using the site search operator, you may find out roughly how many pages from a specific domain Google has in its index:
However, checking the Coverage report in your GSC account is the best method to keep track of this number with more details:
Index Coverage Error:
The number of pages with index coverage problems, which is related to the preceding measure, is also significant. These are any issues that prevent your pages from being indexed when you don’t use any index robots meta tag on purpose. There are a variety of reasons why Google may de-index or refuse to index your pages right immediately.
Because index coverage mistakes occur when something you didn’t do on purpose causes them. It’s critical to be aware of them and to correct them when required. These mistakes can also be seen in the GSC Coverage report:
When you click on a mistake, it will provide a list of URLs that have been affected as well as a link to learn more about it. There’s typically also a step-by-step guide on how to solve it. Sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account. And crawl your website using Site Audit: Indexation if you want to go further and get additional advice on how to address your indexation difficulties.
Web Essentials:
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a collection of three technical SEO metrics that measure the performance and usability of your website. The stats are as follows: The single largest visible element loaded in the viewport is the Largest Content full Paint (LCP).
The period between when a user interacts with your website. And when the page may reply is known as the first input delay (FID). CLS stands for Cumulative Layout Shift, which refers to how components move about on a page and how stable the layout is.
Since June 2021, Google has used CWV as a minor ranking component. It’s probably a good idea to try to improve any or all of these three indicators if they’re all terrible. This reflects Google’s goal of ranking pages that provide a positive user experience. Which includes fast loading times and seamless interaction.
There are several methods to keep track of CWV, but the easiest approach is to look it up in your GSC account under the Core Web Vitals report:
Source: The SEO Expert