Are you not ranking on 1st page of Google even after properly optimizing your website?
Well, how do you measure the success and efficiency of your website and there is no thumb rule when it comes to measuring the success rate of your website because everyone has unique and individual goals which define the success rate.
But in this article, we have covered some general and Important SEO Metrics You Must Keep Track Of if you want to see how your site is performing in the online world.
Tracking these metrics will help you to find out where you are going wrong in your strategies and how you can improve them.
Important SEO Key Performance Indicators You Must Keep Track Of
Here are some of the most Important SEO Metrics that you should always look for while measuring the success rate of your website.
1. SERP Rankings
One of the most important SEO metrics that you should never skip on is where your site is standing in the search engine.
As there are thousands of pages in the search engine and many websites lie on the last pages of the search results.
So you need to accurately investigate the rankings of your website because if you want to drive organic traffic to your website then there is no other alternative than making your website rank on the first page of the search results. However, this metric of SEO needs to combine with other metrics to drive efficient results.
How to track Rankings
You can use various rank tracking tools like SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs etc to know your position on Search Engine.
2. Organic Traffic
Organic Traffic refers to the number of people who comes to your website naturally through search engines.
This does not include paid advertisements.
Organic Traffic is the Most Important SEO Key Performance Indicator you must keep track of because no matter how much efforts you put in SEO if it does not bring any traffic to your website, all your efforts go into vain.
So it is very important to check your organic traffic on a monthly basis.
The organic traffic also depends upon your targeted keywords so if your website is not getting enough organic traffic you need to recheck your targeted keyword and optimize them in a manner so that you get maximum traffic from the search engines.
How to Track Organic Traffic
Tracking organic traffic is very simple as you just need to simply go to your Google Analytics account and add “Organic Traffic” into the audience overview segment.
3. Links and Referring Domains
Most of the SEO erudite consider Links and referring domains as the most important SEO metric as the links indicate the relevancy and authority of your website.
Moreover, Google also considers links as one of their top rankings factor, so you cannot miss on tracking this important SEO metric.
You should always build high-quality and relevant backlinks by creating unique and engaging content.
Never go for paid links as this technique is considered as a black hat SEO technique. Hence always go for natural linking techniques.
How to check your Links and Referring Domains
You can use tools like:-
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs Backlink Audit
- Ubersuggest
- Moz’s Link Explorer
4. Organic Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate refers to the number of visitors who are performing an action on your site.
It may be purchasing a product, subscribing the newsletter or filling up the form.
As organic traffic only makes sure that visitors are coming on your website through organic search results but what if your goal is to generate sales or to collect more emails so for that you blatantly needs to make sure that visitors are converting into your customers and subscribers.
You can check conversion rate on a various basis like location, landing page, device, browser etc so that you get the absolute information which is useful in optimizing your website accordingly.
So if your purpose is to generate more enquiries, sales or subscribers, you need to keep an eye on the most important SEO metric which is the conversion rate.
How to Check Conversion Rate
You can track your conversion rate on Google Analytics.
5. Bounce Rate
If your visitors are bouncing back or leave your site only viewing after one page then you need to keep your eyeballs on this important SEO metric.
High-Bounce rate is not a preferable signal for your website and you need to monitor it consistently so that you make necessary changes to engage visitors and make them stick to your website.
Landing Page design also affects the websites’ bounce rate. If you have a great landing page design, it will help you in decreasing the bounce rate.
Secondly, relevancy also plays an important role in reducing the bounce rate of a website because sometimes users are landed on a different search query from what they searched for.
How to check your Bounce Rate
You can check the bounce rate using Google Analytics.
6. Domain Authority
The next important SEO metrics you must keep track of is the Domain Authority and Page Ranking as Domain Authority is the search engine ranking score which indicates the overall authority of a site.
It also predicts how well a website will rank on Search Engine Results Page.
Higher the score the better your website will rank and vice versa.
Domain Authority depends upon the number of factors like Domain Age, number of quality and relevant backlinks, quality content.
How to check Domain Authority of a website
You can check the Domain Authority by installing the Moz extension for chrome and it will display the domain authority on a scale of 1-100. 100 being the highest Domain Authority and 1 being the lowest.
7. Website Speed
In recent years Google has started giving due importance to the overall speed of a website and is considered as an important ranking factor for both mobile and desktop devices.
Slow website speed destroys the user experience and irritates the user.
So it has become an important SEO metric you must keep track of.
There are many factors responsible for slow website speed like installing too many plugins, using heavy images, too many redirections. Avoiding such factors will ensure that your website is loading at a high speed.
How to Check Website Speed
You can check website speed on Google Page Speeds Insight.
8. Indexed Pages In Google Search Console
No matter if you are regularly updating your content but it doesn’t make any sense if it is not getting indexed, because Search Engines are never going to show the pages that they have not indexed. So it is one of the Important SEO Metrics You Must Keep Track Of.
Most of the people often ignore this important factor. To make sure your pages are indexed more frequently you can manually submit the pages using crawl>Fetch As Google under Search Console.
How to check whether pages are indexed or not
You can check whether your pages are indexed or not using site:example.com/blog.
If it is taking too long to index your pages then you can use manual indexing using Google Search Console.
9. Crawling Errors
In simple words, crawl errors take place when a search engine bots attempt to crawl your webpage but face difficulties while crawling your page.
Google has dichotomized crawling errors into two parts which are site errors and URL errors.
Site errors are the errors that bots face while crawling a website while URL errors are the errors related to URL issues like 404( Not Found ) errors.
In order to keep your site free of errors, you need to regularly monitor your website and make necessary changes to avoid any difficulties and hurdles for web crawlers.
How to check Crawl Errors
You can simply check crawl errors in Google Search Console under Crawl > Crawl Errors.
10. Duplicate Titles and Meta Description
One of the basic and Important SEO metrics is to make sure that all your pages in a website have unique title and meta description.
It more often happens with a website that has huge database so the probability of creating duplicate pages is more.
By creating duplicate pages you are indicating Search Engines that you are trying to rank for same content again and again which is of course not up to the search engines standard.
Even if you have created duplicate title or meta description make sure to fix the error as soon as possible or simply block it to avoid any chaos.
How to check Duplicate Titles and Meta Description
You don’t need any other tool apart from Google Search Console to check the duplicate titles and meta description. You need to simply navigate to Search Appearance > HTML Improvements under Search Console.
Conclusion
SEO is one of the most important and leading factor in improving the rankings of a website, but most importantly you cannot improve your rankings if you don’t analyze these important SEO metrics you must keep check of more frequently.
These metrics will help you to improve your SEO strategies.
Many people simply focus on SEO and forget to measure the results which are simply not an ethical practice.
If your aim is to thrive in the long run in the field of SEO then you cannot ignore to monitor these SEO key Performance Indicators.
