10 Important Metrics to Keep Track of Your SEO Progress

One of the most important parts of your SEO strategy is analytics. Instead of just being an afterthought to be implemented once you think you’re starting to get results, methods for tracking key metrics should be set up from the start to help track your progress and influence areas that need refining.

The benefits of SEO monitoring are wide-reaching, from being able to justify your investment in terms of money and resources to ensuring you’re in line with your goals. With it being possible to measure just about every element of your strategy, it can be difficult to decide which metrics to focus on.

1. Organic traffic

A good place to start with SEO analytics is organic traffic, as it shows you the total number of visitors to your site from unpromoted search results. This metric is a good baseline for understanding how well your SEO efforts are going and whether they’re making a difference to the number of users coming to your website.

2. Clickthrough rate

Once you’ve established the volume of traffic coming from organic search, it’s time to get a bit more nuanced. Measuring clickthrough rate is a good way to see if you could be getting more visitors but they’re simply not selecting your site from the results listed. Identify any roadblocks, such as meta descriptions and title tags, and correct them based on this data.

3. Bounce rate

Effective SEO should attract visitors to your website and lead them through the buyer funnel to help boost conversions. Searchers who land on your page, but then return to the results instead of moving through your site are lost opportunities. Measuring these users is done through a metric known as the bounce rate and ideally you want it to be low.

4. Average session duration

How long visitors stay on your site is a key metric for understanding user engagement. Linked to bounce rate, your average session duration can highlight where you can make changes to entice users to stay longer. Many techniques can be used in conjunction with each other to make users’ sessions longer. Think about technical SEO practices like internal structure and hamburger menus, as well as the quality of your content.

5. Search rankings

Achieving higher positions in search results has a direct impact on areas like traffic, generating leads and conversions, so you’ll definitely want to be tracking your search rankings. Your SEO efforts should see your site moving up the list, but be sure you’re measuring the right keywords so your data is useful to you.

6. Search visibility

Not only do you want your SEO analysis to show the effect your strategy is having, but also to predict how it will perform. Use the search engine visibility score to see how your keywords are ranking and get early information on the optimization of your website. Based on this knowledge, you can make tweaks and improvements for maximum effect.

7. Organic conversions

While it’s great to be found in search and attract traffic to your website, it’s vital a large proportion of these leads convert, otherwise you can’t monetize those visitors. What a conversion looks like will be different for various businesses and industries, so you need to set up a goal in your tracking tool. This could be an online purchase or a phone call to the company, but such aims will show you how successful your SEO practices are.

8. Backlinks

Backlinks are a key factor in improving rankings in modern-day SEO, but it’s not just about the number of sites that are linking to yours, it’s their quality. Tracking the behavior of others that is having a direct impact on your website may not be something you’ve thought of, but you shouldn’t overlook it. Use a link authority index tool to find out the quality of your link profile as determined by your referring domains.

9. Competitor analysis

Going further than just how others are linking to your site, you need to know how your competitors are performing in order to give yourself the best chance in the market. Understanding their SEO metrics, including domain authority and keyword rankings, will help influence your own strategy and set goals. Measuring competitors’ keywords will give you valuable insight into the search terms you should be targeting.

10. SEO health check

Finally, a regular site-wide checkup is an effective way to ensure any issues - big or small - are dealt with before they have an impact on your SEO. Technical problems, changes to algorithms or best practice and content or links that have been outdated can be flagged during this process. When setting out your SEO strategy, plan a health check at appropriate intervals and present your findings in a way that makes it easy to compare them over time to track your SEO progress.

To learn more about the most important content metrics and best practices, listen to our interview with Marco Giordano on The Strategic Marketing Show:

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