The Top Most Important SEO Metrics to Track Performance

As a website owner, you want to know how well your site is performing, and that's where SEO metrics come in. Tracking the right metrics can help you identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to boost your online presence.

Here are the top SEO metrics to track performance. Organic traffic is a key metric to focus on, as it directly impacts your website's visibility and credibility.

Page speed is another crucial metric, as slow-loading pages can lead to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings. In fact, a 1-second delay in page loading time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

Tracking keyword rankings is also essential, as it helps you understand how well your content is performing for specific search terms. By monitoring your keyword rankings, you can adjust your content strategy to better match user search behavior.

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Vanity metrics are a trap many business owners fall into. They're metrics that look good on paper but don't give you any insight into how to improve your business.

For example, website pageviews are a vanity metric because they don't tell you where that traffic is coming from or what they're doing on your site.

Social media followers are another example of a vanity metric. Having a large number of followers doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something right.

The problem with vanity metrics is that they're easy to manipulate. You can artificially inflate your numbers by buying followers or using bots to drive up your pageviews.

On the other hand, actionable metrics provide insights into how you can improve your business. Actionable metrics are the ones that give you a clear picture of what's working and what's not.

Here's a quick rundown of the difference between vanity metrics and actionable metrics:

Think about it like this: if you're only focusing on vanity metrics, you might be wasting your time and resources on things that aren't actually driving results.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential for measuring SEO success, as they help you understand how well your efforts are aligning with your business or client's goals. A clear marketing strategy is crucial, and your KPIs should be linked to these objectives.

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To effectively assess the performance of your SEO activities, you should link your KPIs to clear marketing objectives. Ideally, your business or client has developed a digital marketing strategy outlining good marketing goals. You can use tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to find data about how prospective students engage with your website.

A metric is a data point or quantifiable measure you might use to monitor performance, but a KPI is an integral marker of success or ROI. For example, if your goal is to increase enrollment, a metric might be organic impressions, while a KPI might be the conversion rate.

Here are some key differences to keep in mind:

By understanding the difference between metrics and KPIs, you can focus your efforts on the metrics that will offer insight into the most vital aspects of your SEO strategy and make data-driven decisions to maximize the results of your marketing efforts.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential for measuring SEO success. They help you focus on the metrics that will offer insight into the most vital aspects of your SEO strategy.

A KPI is linked to clear marketing objectives, ideally developed in a digital marketing strategy outlining good marketing goals. This ensures that your KPIs are aligned with your business or client's goals.

To effectively assess the performance of your SEO activities, you should link your KPIs to these objectives. This helps you make data-driven decisions to maximize the results of your marketing efforts.

A metric is a data point or other quantifiable measure you might use to monitor performance, but it's not an integral marker of success or ROI. For example, organic impressions are a metric, but the conversion rate is a KPI.

Here are some key performance indicators to employ and link to the client's or company's goals:

By tracking the right KPIs, you can make informed decisions and optimize your SEO strategy for better results.

Branded vs. Non-Branded Search is a crucial KPI to track, as it reveals how well-known your brand is and how effective your overall marketing efforts are.

A high percentage of branded search traffic indicates strong brand awareness, as people are actively searching for your company or products by name. This is a good sign, but a healthy balance of branded and non-branded traffic is ideal, as it shows you’re attracting both existing customers and new audiences.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you track your branded vs. non-branded search traffic, giving you valuable insights into how people discover your website.

Branded keywords show brand awareness, as these users are searching for information specifically related to your institution, often with a higher CTR.

Non-branded terms present an opportunity to reach prospective students who may have never heard about your brand before but are looking for a program that you offer. Appearing for non-branded search queries can be more challenging as you are competing with all other institutions that offer the same program.

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Keyword rankings are a reliable metric to track, and maintaining a top rank can give you a sense of accomplishment. You can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to track your keyword rankings and see how your site is performing for specific terms.

A higher keyword ranking means your website is more likely to drive traffic to your site. But, a website's keyword rankings can frequently change due to various reasons such as algorithm updates, lost backlinks, or competitors updating their content.

You can track your keyword rankings using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, and see which terms are working well for you and which ones aren't. By tracking this metric, you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly to focus on the ones that are giving you the best results.

Here's a breakdown of the different metrics related to search engine rankings and visibility:

By tracking these metrics, you can gain insights into your website's performance in Google organic search results and make data-driven decisions to improve your SEO strategy.

Rankings are a crucial aspect of search engine optimization (SEO). They help you understand how well your website is performing for specific keywords.

Keyword rankings reveal whether you're using the right keywords and if your website is visible for your desired terms. If your website isn't ranking for your desired keywords, consider shifting your focus to less competitive terms.

Maintaining top rank for your keywords can boost your ego, but it's a reliable metric that indicates your website is becoming more authoritative. Improvements in keyword rankings and the number of keywords your site is ranking for over time indicate a genuine expansion of your site.

A higher search visibility score means your website is more likely to be seen by users searching for relevant terms, regardless of whether they click on your listings or not. This metric provides a comprehensive overview of your SEO performance.

Tracking keyword rankings can help you see which terms are working well for you and which ones aren't. You can then adjust your SEO strategy to focus on the ones that are giving you the best results.

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Here's a rough guide to keyword rankings:

A website's keyword rankings can frequently change due to various reasons, such as algorithm updates, lost backlinks, or competitors updating their content. Keeping a watch on your SEO rankings is essential to avoid losing traffic to your site.

To monitor your keyword rankings, set up a campaign in a Position Tracking tool. This will track your rankings daily and automatically. You can add keywords manually or import a list from an existing resource.

A higher visibility percentage in the SERP means your website is more likely to bring visitors to your site. To increase visibility, you can edit your content to better optimize for the SERP features that are currently appearing in the search results, add structured data to your pages, or build more backlinks.

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Sitelinks are a sign of authority and trust, as Google only displays them for websites that it considers to be high-quality and relevant to the user’s search query.

These links typically point to popular or important pages on your site, such as your homepage, about page, or product categories.

They can also improve your CTR by making your listing more prominent and informative in the search results.

To increase your chances of getting sitelinks, create a clear and well-organized website structure.

Using descriptive anchor text for your internal links can also help.

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Featured snippets are the short excerpts of text that appear at the top of some search results, providing quick answers to user queries without the need to click on any links.

They can drive a lot of visibility to your website, but can also reduce clicks, as users get the information they need directly from the search results.

To optimize for featured snippets, focus on creating concise, informative content that directly answers common questions related to your target keywords.

Use clear headings and bullet points to make your content easy to scan, and consider adding a FAQ section to your pages.

For your interest: Seo Organic Results

A 100% visibility score means your domain ranks in the first position in the SERP for all your tracked keywords, which can increase your chances of getting featured snippets.

However, even if you don’t get any clicks from a featured snippet, it’s still a valuable achievement, signaling to Google that your content is high-quality and relevant, which can boost your overall SEO performance.

To increase your chances of getting featured snippets, keep a close eye on the "Visibility" index in the dashboard, which shows your site’s progress in Google’s top 100 results for the keywords in your tracking campaign.

Here are some key statistics to aim for:

Page speed is a critical factor for both user experience and SEO. It's the time it takes for a web page to fully display, and if your pages take too long to load, visitors are likely to bounce.

Google has made it clear that page speed is a ranking factor, and faster websites tend to rank higher in search results. This means that optimizing your page speed can improve user engagement and boost your website's visibility in search engines.

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Several tools can measure your page speed, including Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. These tools analyze your website's performance and provide suggestions for improvement.

Common issues that can slow down your website include large image files, unoptimized code, and excessive use of plugins or scripts. To improve your page speed, focus on optimizing your images, minifying your code, and leveraging browser caching.

Here are some key metrics to focus on:

Optimizing these metrics can lead to a better user experience, lower bounce rates, and higher engagement. This, in turn, can improve your website's visibility in search results, leading to more organic traffic and conversions.

Backlinks are one of the most important Google ranking factors, and tracking them is crucial for your SEO strategy.

More than 200 different variables influence your rankings, but backlinks continue to be a key ranking factor. You need to improve both the quantity and quality of your backlinks to get Google's reward.

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The number of new referring domains tells you how many unique websites link to your site. This metric is more valuable than the total number of backlinks, as Google gives less weight to links from the same site.

Tracking and monitoring your backlinks is critical, and you can easily do that with Backlink Analytics. You'll get a snapshot of your site's referring domains and total backlinks.

Domain Authority (DA) measures the strength of your website and is determined by factors such as age, popularity, and size. A high DA indicates that your website is well-established, has a strong backlink profile, and is likely to rank well for competitive keywords.

To check your website's DA, you can use the free tools provided by Moz or Ahrefs. These tools will give you a score between 1 and 100, with higher scores indicating greater authority.

Here's a rough idea of how DA varies across different industries:

Domain Authority is not an official Google ranking factor, but it's an important metric to monitor because it's calculated based on things that are ranking factors. If you want to show up at the top of the search results, work towards increasing your Domain Authority.

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User behavior and engagement are crucial metrics to track in SEO. A high bounce rate, for example, can indicate that users are not finding what they're looking for on your site.

In Google Analytics 4, bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate, which measures the percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions. This means that if your bounce rate is high, it's likely because users are not engaging with your content.

Engagement metrics, such as time on page and average engagement time, provide insight into how well your content meets search intent. A high time on page can indicate that users are finding your content valuable and engaging.

Here are some typical bounce rates for different industries:

To improve engagement, focus on creating high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience. Break up long blocks of text with images, videos, and subheadings to make it easier to read.

Engagement is a crucial aspect of user behavior, and it's essential to understand how users interact with your website. A high bounce rate can indicate a problem with specific pages or your website as a whole.

A bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit only one page on your website. A good benchmark for overall site CTR is between 2% and 3% for higher ed websites, while page-level CTR is typically in the 1% to 2% range. This means that if 100 people visit your website, 2-3 of them will engage with your content beyond the first page.

To reduce bounce rate, ensure the page aligns with search intent, and make the purpose of the page immediately clear by putting important details above the fold. You can also create genuinely great content that makes users want to explore your site more. A session is a period of time during which a user interacts with your website or app, and it's essential to track sessions to measure SEO performance.

A good organic CTR can vary depending on the industry and search query, but generally, a CTR above the average for your industry is considered good. To improve your organic CTR, focus on creating clear, concise, and compelling title tags and meta descriptions that accurately reflect the content of your page and entice users to click.

Here are some key engagement metrics to track:

These metrics will help you understand how users engage with your website and identify areas for improvement.

Bounce or Engagement: What's the Difference?

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that weren't engaged sessions, which means users quickly click the back button after visiting your website. This is not a good sign, as Google wants its users to be satisfied.

A high bounce rate can indicate a problem with specific pages or your website as a whole. You can track bounce rate in Google Analytics, but in GA4, you can no longer access this metric directly.

Engagement rate, on the other hand, measures the percentage of engaged sessions compared to the total number of sessions. An engaged session is one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.

To put it simply, engagement rate is the inverse of bounce rate.

Here are some typical bounce rate ranges for different industries:

To improve engagement and reduce bounce rate, focus on creating high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience. Ensure your website loads quickly and is mobile-friendly, and make it easy for visitors to navigate and find what they're looking for.

Mobile is a crucial aspect of user behavior and engagement, especially with the majority of users accessing websites on their mobile devices. Mobile search is more popular than desktop search among users.

A surge in mobile traffic indicates that your website has strong interaction metrics, is responsive, and loads rapidly. This is especially true if you've recently made changes to meet mobile requirements.

You can check your website's mobile-friendliness using Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool, which analyzes your website and tells you whether it meets Google's mobile-friendly criteria. Common issues that can affect mobile-friendliness include small font sizes, touch elements that are too close together, and content that doesn't fit on a mobile screen.

If you're in a niche like Beauty and Fitness, People and Society, Pets and Animals, Home and Garden, or Health, you should anticipate that more than 60% of your traffic will originate from mobile visitors.

To make your website mobile-friendly, use a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes, ensure your font sizes are large enough to read on a small screen, and make sure your touch elements are easy to tap with a finger. You can also use Google's AMP framework to create fast-loading mobile pages.

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Social shares are a crucial factor in your SEO efforts, and they can actually increase the likelihood that more people will watch your material and eventually visit your website.

More social shares mean more visitors, which in turn can lead to a rise in your website's organic search ranking.

To track social media shares, you can add social sharing buttons to your website, a feature that Yoast offers.

Incorrect geography or business information on your social media accounts can hurt your SERPs rating, so be sure to keep an eye out for any mistakes.

In Google Analytics, you can find a glimpse of your website's traffic sources by selecting Acquisition>>Traffic Acquisition and then clicking on Channels.

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Text readability is crucial for delivering a frictionless experience to users, and it's also important to search engines like Google and Bing. They make your text easier to comprehend.

Tools like Yoast provide a readability score for every page on your website, including a grade based on the Flesch reading ease score. This score can help you gauge the quality of your content.

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Clearscope analyzes content for relevance based on related search terms and entities found in competitor content. The more relevant terms you include from their list, the higher your grade.

Using shorter sentences, paragraphs, and sections, as well as active voice and transition words, can make your text easier to digest. This is not just a matter of style, but also of content quality.

Actionable content with clear takeaways is more valuable than overstuffed fluff. This is why it's essential to focus on delivering high-quality content to your users.

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Having good technical health is crucial for search engine optimization (SEO). It means search engines can crawl and index your webpages, rank them for relevant queries, and impact how fast your website loads and how easy it is to use on mobile devices.

Your website's technical health score, also called an SEO score or technical health score, can be measured using tools like Semrush's Site Audit tool. A higher score indicates fewer critical issues, which likely means better search engine rankings.

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To check your website's technical health, use Semrush's Site Audit tool and enter your domain name. Then, click "Start Audit" and follow the configuration guide to set up your audit. The tool will provide a Site Health score, and you can click on the "Issues" tab to see all the technical issues listed one by one.

Here are some common crawl errors that can impact your website's visibility in search results:

You can track crawl errors in Google Search Console, which provides a report on crawl errors encountered by Googlebot, along with details about the affected pages and the types of errors.

Crawl errors are problems that prevent search engines from being able to crawl and index your site properly. This can hurt your performance in search results.

A sudden increase in crawl errors is a sign that something is wrong with your website and you need to investigate further. You can check crawl errors by visiting Google Search Console, under the "Craws Stats" tab.

Crawl errors occur when a search engine tries to reach a page on your site but can't. Common crawl errors include server errors (5xx errors), not found errors (404 errors), and robots.txt errors.

Server errors indicate problems with your website's server, such as a server overload or a misconfiguration. Not found errors occur when a requested page doesn't exist or has been moved without proper redirection. Robots.txt errors occur when your robots.txt file is configured incorrectly and blocks access to important pages.

To fix crawl errors, investigate the cause and take steps to fix them. For server errors, you might need to contact your hosting provider. For 404 errors, you can create redirects to point users to the correct pages. And for robots.txt errors, you'll need to update your robots.txt file to allow access to the necessary pages.

Here are some common crawl errors and their possible causes:

If you notice that some of your pages aren't indexed, you'll need to investigate the cause and take steps to fix it. Common reasons for pages not being indexed include noindex tags, robots.txt blocking, and crawl errors. Ensure all your important pages are accessible to search engine bots and don't have any directives preventing indexing.

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Indexed pages are a crucial aspect of your website's visibility in search results. To appear in search results, your pages need to be indexed by search engines.

You can check the number of indexed pages for your website in Google Search Console. This tool provides a report on the total number of indexed pages, along with any errors that might prevent pages from being indexed.

If you notice that some of your pages aren't indexed, common reasons include noindex tags, robots.txt blocking, and crawl errors. Ensure all your important pages are accessible to search engine bots and don't have any directives preventing indexing.

A sudden decrease in the number of indexed pages is a sign that something is wrong with your content. Check this metric by going to Google Search Console and clicking on the "Coverage" tab.

You can also use Google to check all the pages indexed on your site by using the search operator: site:yoursite.com.

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To ensure all relevant pages on your site are properly indexed, use Google Search Console. One important side note: if your indexed pages are duplicated, outdated, irrelevant, or thin, it could hurt your overall site authority.

Here are some actions to take if you identify low-quality indexed pages:

On-page optimization scores are a key part of technical health and SEO. These scores help you understand how well your page is optimized for search engines.

Tools like Ahrefs Site Audit can analyze your page and provide a score based on various factors. This score may take into account keyword density, keywords in headings and subheadings, and related keywords in headings and subheadings.

A well-optimized page should have a good balance of keywords and related keywords throughout its content. This can include keywords in headings and subheadings, as well as internal and external linking.

Here are some key factors that affect on-page optimization scores: