As a digital marketer, everyone is very much eager to know about the results of their work. We are always anxious about what could be the results of our work as we have put a lot of efforts in that. The best way to measure the success of our work is by examining SEO metrics.
SEO metrics are the key performance indicators of the success of SEO campaigns. SEO metrics can tell you that the money which you have spent on SEO and digital marketing, in general, are worth it or not.
In the minds of many people, SEO is all about getting high rankings for particular keywords and also this is not false at all, it is not completely true either. SEO is about making your website easier to be discovered and understood by the search engines and friendlier to the users. If you do this using the best practices then sooner or later, SEO will work and you will gain higher rankings.
Search Engine Optimization and reporting go hand in hand. Clients need proper reports which help them in understanding the ROI which is achieved from the SEO. In the past, a metric like keyword rankings was enough to make the client happy, but now the things have changed and most importantly they have changed for the better purpose. So, the most important metrics that SEO must have considered them are listed below with the highest priority;
- Organic traffic:-
- Organic traffic is defined as the traffic that you earn from appearing in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) without paying for placements.
- So, it is very much important to track your overall organic traffic so that you can see how many people are visiting your website as a result of your SEO strategy.
- You also need to track organic traffic by landing pages because that is how you can determine where you need improvement in your website.
- For eg; if you find that some of your pages are ranking on page 1 and others are ranked on page 7 then you know that you need to direct your SEO efforts towards those pages that are ranking poorly. And if you are using different SEO strategies for different pages then you will get an idea of which strategies works the best when you compare the rankings.
- Organic bounce rate:-
- The bounce rate tells you how many people have bounced away from your website after viewing the one page only.
- It is measured as a percentage of visitors with a lower number being better.
- If you see that your website is having a high bounce rate then this means that you need to do some on-site work to keep people around.
- It is also a good idea that you inspect the bounce rate of your website by landing pages. Through this way, you can see that which landing pages tend to turn away visitors and which ones keep them hanging around for more.
- If the landing page is having a high bounce rate, then that could be the indicator that your content on the page did not match with the keywords which visitors have plugged into the search engine.
- Also, it could mean that the person has quickly found what they were looking for and left, so you need to be very much careful about that.
- Organic conversion rate:-
- Always remember that organic traffic only gets people to your website and it does not mean that you have made the sale. This is the reason that you need to measure the conversion rate.
- You will want to check your aggregate conversion rate for your organic traffic. Through this way, you will get an idea of how well you are appealing overall to the people who arrive at your website from the search results.
- However, you will also want to drill down into various segments to see what factors are impacting conversion rates.
- Also, it is almost impossible to capture a healthy market share unless you appeal to be a mobile audience.
- If you find out that your conversions for desktop users are unusually higher than the conversions for some smartphone or tablet users, then your website is probably not optimized for a mobile audience.
- So, run some tests and contact your development team to improve the mobile experience.
Thus, fancy SEO metrics like page views do not work anymore. So, start preparing monitoring important SEO metrics which are shared above and constantly try to improve your website with the current SEO strategy. Therefore, the best you can do is execute your strategy, deliver your content with the value and try to keep your metrics in line month after month.