Top 10 SEO Metrics to Measure Your SEO Performance
Planning to introduce an SEO strategy for your website? SEO is a long-term process and its effects are visible no sooner than after a few months, so you should regularly track the most important SEO metrics and KPIs to check if your SEO strategy is on the right track. In this article, I’ve compiled a list of the most relevant metrics and parameters you should be measuring. Check them out!
Table of contents:
10 SEO Metrics to Make Data-Driven Decisions
1. Organic Traffic
This is, without a doubt, the most important metric for measuring the effectiveness of your SEO process. After all, that’s what we all want – to drive web traffic and get more and more visitors.
There are many types of web traffic, such as referral, direct, social, or paid, however, in SEO, we are particularly interested in increasing one specific type of traffic, i.e. organic traffic. These are all user visits that reached your site from search engines (excluding paid search results).
How to measure organic traffic?
Google Analytics is a great tool for measuring your web performance, so if you still haven’t implemented tracking code, it’s high time to change that!
One of the key reports you can find in this great Google tool is Acquisition – there you will find all data on how users arrived at your website.
Go to the Channels report, specify the date range and analyze all traffic sources, including organic traffic.
If you’d like to learn more about traffic sources, check out our comprehensive Google Analytics guide – there, you’ll find all the information you need!
2. Keyword Ranking
The higher the keyword ranking, the greater the chance to increase your website traffic – as simple as that! Keyword ranking is directly correlated with your SEO success, so if you want people to enter your site from Google, then you need to rank high for the most important keywords for your business that have immense potential to build traffic.
Remember, it’s not just the number of keywords, but also the quality that matters! Keywords should be closely related to your offer and the industry, otherwise, your organic CTR (I’ll talk more about this metric below ) will be dramatically low.
How to measure keyword ranking?
There are many tools to measure keyword ranking. Here I present, in my opinion, the best of them:
1. Ahrefs
Check the Organic keywords report (you’ll find it in the Site Explorer tool). Analyze all the organic keywords your site ranks for. You can also compare how your site ranked on different days – it’s a great way to see if your keyword ranking has improved.
2. SERPROBOT
SERPROBOT is a great tool that helps you easily monitor your keyword rankings. Choose the region, enter your domain and the list of keywords you would like to analyze and the tool will generate a detailed report of particular keyword performance.
At our blog, you will find a more detailed guide on how to check the website Google position.
3. Search Visibility
This SEO metric indicates how often your site appears in organic search results when users enter a given keyword.
Measuring your search visibility can be beneficial for several reasons as it’s a great way to:
- check if your optimization process brings the desired results,
- analyze which page or piece of content is most often searched by users and draws their attention,
- check if your website was penalized by Google as the most common form of Google’s manual actions is a sudden drop in search visibility.
How to measure search visibility?
If you want to analyze search visibility, the most efficient way is to do it with Google Search Console. Remember that other SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush only show the estimated visibility or traffic, while Google Search Console has the advantage of presenting totally accurate data. It really is a reliable source of information about search visibility!
Go to the Performance report, and you will receive visibility charts. Here, Total impressions indicate visibility in search results.
Would you like to explore all the key Google Search Console reports? On our blog, I indicate the 5 most important ones – they will a huge help when developing the SEO process for your website.
4. Backlinks
Let’s face it, your site simply must have many strong backlinks coming from trusted sites – this sends a signal to Google that your site is extremely popular among users who are more likely to mention your brand or recommend it. That’s why link building is a fundamental (and integral!) part of your SEO process.
When it comes to backlinks, you should measure:
- the number of backlinks,
- the number of referring domains,
- link type (dofollow, nofollow, UGC, educational, etc.),
- link platform (blogs, eCommerce, social media, etc.)
How to measure backlinks?
When it comes to measuring backlinks, Ahrefs is the undisputed winner. This tool has analyzed over 5 billion pages so far, so it is able to find maximum links leading to your site from other domains.
To check the number of backlinks and referring domains, just enter your domain and select the Overview report.
Click on Backlinks (or find the Backlinks report on the right) – there you will see all links pointing to your site.
5. Authority Metrics
Tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic have developed their own authority metrics to evaluate the quality of domains or specific pages. These are:
- Domain Authority & Page Authority by Moz,
- Domain Rating & URL Rating by Ahrefs,
- Trust Flow & Citation Flow by Majestic.
The rule is simple: the higher the authority metric, the better. I recommend monitoring these metrics (especially DA and PA by Moz which most marketers and SEO experts in the world follow) on a regular basis to see if the SEO campaign translates into trust from Google.
How to measure authority metrics?
If you want to track these metrics, you should subscribe to Ahrefs, Majestic, or Moz as all these tools are paid (only in Moz you can analyze 10 domains for free).
Moz:
Go to the Link Explorer tool and enter the domain or a given page:
You will get a report with the PA and DA metrics:
In Ahrefs:
Enter the URL or go to the Overview report:
6. Bounce Rate
“Bounced” sessions occur when a user enters your site and quickly exits without any interaction, such as clicking on a link or visiting another page. The bounce rate is expressed as a percentage.
While a high bounce rate is interpreted as something negative, suggesting that users don’t find anything interesting on your site, it doesn’t always have to necessarily mean that! To some extent, it depends on your niche and type of site. Let’s say you run a barber hair salon, most users will visit your site to check prices, contact details, opening hours, and then they will leave immediately. In this case, does a high bounce rate indicate a low user engagement? Absolutely not! So sometimes it’s worth complementing your bounce rate analysis with scroll depth – which will show you how far your users scroll down.
How to measure bounce rate?
Practically every report in Google Analytics includes the Bounce rate column:
7. Average Session Duration
This SEO metric, as its name indicates, tells you how much time users have spent on your site. It is one of the most important user engagement metrics, especially in content marketing. If you want to measure whether users actually read your content, it’s a good idea to analyze the average session duration.
How to measure average session duration?
Here, Google Analytics also comes with help providing average session duration in most reports:
8. Conversion Rate
A conversion is defined as each user session that led to achieving a particular goal. This could be purchase in an online store, reading an entire blog article, submitting a form, or watching a video.
Tracking conversion rate is extremely important as it gives you loads of information on the profitability of particular traffic sources, types of users (when it comes to demographics, interests, location), or devices.
How to measure conversion rate?
Once again, Google Analytics proves to be the best solution. All the important information can be found in the Conversions section.
Keep in mind, however, that in order to track conversions, you need to set up a goal in Google Analytics first.
If you’d like to learn how to create goals in Google Analytics so that you can effectively track conversions, check out our complete guide!
9. Organic CTR
Above, I discussed how important it is to monitor your site’s visibility in organic search results, but that’s not all you need to do! You should also track what percentage of impressions translate into clicks. And that’s exactly what organic CTR (click-through rate) is all about.
The SEO metric clearly indicates how your site is appealing to users and whether it is displayed on relevant keywords.
How to measure organic CTR?
Organic CTR can be found in Google Search Console. Go to the Performance report, and you will see this metric on the chart:
10. Crawl Errors
Many people tend to forget to regularly check if their website is correctly indexed by Google and if any errors, such as 404 error or 500 error, occur. And yet, it’s extremely important for your site to function properly and build visibility in search results – if Google can’t see your pages or crawl them, then you’re missing out on an opportunity to boost organic web traffic. So keep an eye on crawl errors and if any error occurs, fix it as a priority.
How to measure crawl errors?
Go to Google Search Console and check the Coverage report (in the Index section). You will see a report with all types of harmful crawl errors:
SEO Metrics: Final Thoughts
Above, I described the most important SEO metrics that you should track regularly to assess whether your SEO process is effective and brings tangible results. There are other influential metrics I didn’t put on my list, but they shouldn’t be overlooked. These are:
- new visitors,
- returning visitors,
- pages per visit,
- exit pages,
- page speed.
When it comes to SEO, you should always make data-driven decisions – only they can give you the best results in the long run. Try to constantly monitor different SEO metrics, and don’t just focus on one or two of them – the combination of these 10 SEO metrics will give you a full picture of your SEO performance.
And which SEO metrics do you measure to evaluate the effectiveness of your optimization process? Let me know in your comments!
Can I set these metrics as SEO process KPIs?
Yes, if you feel like these metrics will suit your activities and will illustrate the progress well then go ahead make them your KPIs! However, remember to always choose KPIs accordingly to your process’ specificities, and keep in mind what information will be helpful for you 🙂