SEO Tracking Metrics To Monitor Performance

Setting defined SEO KPIs with your internal team and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) agency is crucial when it comes to measuring organic search marketing success.

Without the proper SEO tracking metrics in place, assessing your SEO effectiveness becomes more difficult as time goes on, and your chances of getting the most of your performance.

So, what exactly should you be keeping an eye on?

The experts of the SEO division dive into the KPIs that is utilized with clients regularly to track and measure SEO performance. It helps you to better understand your key areas and focus your attention on such points so that you can maximize the output.

Going in the right direction is the best thing one can do and for that, you should be keeping track of what you are following. Similarly, SEO metrics help you to get in the right direction so that you can always achieve success in the short term.

Read More: How To Do Competition Analysis In SEO

What Is SEO Tracking And How Does It Work?

You may have a few queries regarding how to monitor and report your SEO results if you’re new to the process.

Fortunately, SEO tracking is less complicated than it appears. It simply entails selecting which metrics are most critical for your business and then tracking your progress using those indicators regularly.

The key to getting useful information from SEO tracking, though, is choosing the correct metrics. After all, you could be tracking thousands of metrics. A monthly report consisting of all these facts will take hours to finish.

You can produce reports that are far more consumable, manageable, and useful if you only use a few metrics.

This is especially true if you create and deliver your findings using a reporting tool like Google’s Data Studio.

The reports will make it easy to assess how well your approach is working.

What Are SEO Tracking Metrics?

SEO Metrics is a method through which you can effectively measure your SEO efforts and make appropriate changes to them based on your intent. So, before we go, it’s critical to have a firm grasp on what this implies from the perspective of SEO.

A metric is a numerical representation of a specific piece of data. It’s granular, direct, and leaves little opportunity for misunderstanding.

When you create metrics-based reports, you essentially focus on specific markers of performance that can be reliably assessed.

While it can be tough to pinpoint which methods are responsible for your results if your SEO approach is complicated, the results are based on data that is straightforward to track.

SEO Metrics To Monitor Performance

The truth is that success isn’t determined by a single SEO tracking statistic.

From traffic to dwell time and organic click-through rate, there are a variety of metrics to consider if you want to get the full picture of your search engine optimization efforts.

If you merely track a few measures, you risk missing the larger picture and wasting time and money on approaches that don’t produce meaningful revenue.

Let’s See How This Works In Practice

Let’s pretend you’re a high-end sportswear brand situated in Los Angeles. You’ve finally gotten to the top of the search results for “purchase activewear online,” and you’re getting truckloads of organic traffic.

That appears to be a Win-Win situation. However, if you dig a little deeper, you might discover that your search traffic isn’t converting, or that your sales aren’t increasing at the same rate as your site visits.

Even if you exclusively ship to the United States, you can find that the majority of the organic traffic to your pages comes from the United Kingdom. Once you know this, you may want to concentrate on more location-specific keywords, such as “best activewear in LA,” to drive more targeted traffic to your pages.

The moral of the story is that on the surface, it appears that you are achieving your objectives. But, at the end of the day, if it’s not providing you with what you want, it’s not worth it.

So, what are the most important KPIs to track when it comes to SEO performance on your pages?

These few SEO KPIs can help you determine whether your hard work is paying off and, if necessary, identify areas for improvement.

Traffic That Comes From Naturally (Organic Traffic)

Organic traffic KPIs are metrics that are widely used by marketing teams to measure and track the quality of their content and the efforts they have put in SEO.

Organic traffic is one of the most significant criteria for evaluating SEO efforts. This is because this figure represents all of the visitors that come to your site only because of organic search.

While overall visitor counts might give you a sense of how well your site is performing, focusing on organic traffic is a better approach to assessing the direct impact of your SEO strategy.

After all, improving your visibility in search for keywords related to your brand and sector is one of the main aims of any SEO Plan, and it stands to reason that if you’re succeeding, the number of people you receive through search results should continuously climb.

And Google Analytics makes it very easy to get this data.

The report will show your site’s organic traffic for the last month by default. You can view the total number of sessions you’ve had, as well as how that number has changed over the month.

You may also change the time range to get a more detailed picture of your organic traffic performance and determine if it’s related to your SEO efforts.

Month-over-month and year-over-year statistics are a terrific method to visualize the long-term effect your SEO has on your site as you develop your approach.

Read More: How To Create An SEO Strategy To Get High Traffic In 2022

Sales Or Leads

Your website should help, and in some circumstances, it should be your entire business! As a result, if your website is a Lead Generation site, it must either gather leads or sell things if it is an E-commerce site. 

In either case, your business cannot live without leads or revenue, thus evaluating the impact of your SEO plan on these metrics is vital.

Leads

It not only helps you in improvisation but by careful monitoring of your leads, you will know the effective way to approach them.

Let’s begin with lead generation sites. Typically, lead generation sites would encourage users to fill out a form with their name, phone number, and email address. The company then uses that information to qualify the lead and determine whether or not they are a good fit for the product or service.

Form completions must be measured to track leads. If a visitor completes a form on your site and is directed to a unique landing page, such as a “Thank You” page, you can simply set up a Destination objective in Google Analytics to track how many people arrive at that page.

While this will work the majority of the time, there may be some complications. One typical problem is that websites don’t always de-index these “Thank You” pages, which means they might sometimes rank for terms, resulting in false positives. 

Another concern is that if the form may be submitted without all fields being filled in, you might end up having leads that are hard to track up.

You can evaluate purchase activity on your site or app using Google Analytics’ standard E-commerce reports. You may examine information on products and transactions, as well as the average order value, Internet conversion rate, time to purchase, and other statistics.

Enhanced E-commerce high social media by allowing you to observe when customers have added products to their shopping carts, begun the checkout process, and completed a transaction. You can also utilize Enhanced E-commerce to detect consumer segments that are exiting the Sales Funnel.

Whatever option you choose, we recommend using Google Tag Manager to implement it. 

After that, you can go to Google Analytics and see all of your Ecommerce data broken down by traffic type.

Read More: How To Generate Leads From Blog Posts

CTR (Click Through Rate)

The percentage of searchers that visit your website after seeing one of your pages in search results is known as your click-through rate.

For example, your CTR would be 10% if ten separate individuals saw one of your sites ranking in Google’s results for a specific search, but only one of them clicked and visited your site.

This measure is one of the finest indicators of how well your pages in search results attract consumers’ attention.

As a result, it’s a good measure of how well your site’s Title Tags and Meta Descriptions are written.

After all, these are the elements that appear when one of your sites appears in a search — and they’re what searchers use to decide whether or not they want to visit your website.

If your click-through rates are low, your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions may require improvement.

However, it’s equally critical to appreciate the importance of ranks in CTR.

The lower your site ranks in search, the lower your CTR should be. Keeping an eye on this metric, though, is a useful method to track your progress over time.

And if it doesn’t rise, you know you’ve got some work ahead of you.

Read More: Tweaks For Page Title & Meta Description That’ll Boost Your SEO Traffic & CTR

Referring Domains & Backlinks

Backlinks are the most essential ranking criteria in SEO, along with quality and accurate content. As a result, you must keep track of the backlinks leading to your website. When it comes to backlinks, though, there are a few factors to bear in mind.

The total number of backlinks is significant. While it’s not unusual for a website with fewer backlinks to outrank the competition, if you have 30  backlinks and the top result has 20,000, you’ll nearly never outrank them.

It’s important to consider the relevance and quality of the sites that link to you. If you sell medical products and receive thousands of backlinks from a website that sells concert tickets, Google would most certainly regard these links as spam.

The variety of referring (linking) domains is important. Search engines consider both the total number of backlinks and the number of different websites that connect to you. A total of 10,000 backlinks from 500 websites is usually preferable to a total of 2000 backlinks from two websites.

Read More: Anchor Text: An Ultimate Guide About Building Backlinks

Page Load Speed

Average Page Load Time is our final SEO metric from Google Analytics. This indicator checks how rapidly your webpages load in the browser, as the name suggests. Fast web pages are essential for user experience and SEO, especially on mobile devices.

Also, if your page load speed is low then the chances of bounce rate are relatively higher.

Go to Behavior>Site Speed>Page Timings in Google Analytics. Change the metric in the second column to Avg. Page Load Time (sec). You can then view your average load times for all pages or search for specific pages using the search bar.

Faster load times are always better for SEO (and indeed all channels), so strive to keep this time to a minimum. A decent starting aim is to get under 10 seconds, with 3 seconds as a stretch goal.

Read More: How Does Page Speed Affect SEO And How To Improve It?

Dwelling Period

The length of time a customer spends looking at your sites after clicking through from a search engine like Google before returning to the search engine is referred to as dwell time. 

This is one of the most important engagement metrics since it reveals how well your content responds to a search query.

After all, if a visitor stays on your landing page for a long time, it implies they’re interested in what you’re saying and that you’re providing a great user experience. That’s a solid sign to Google that you’re bringing in relevant organic traffic.

So, how can you figure out how long you’ve been in a room?

This is referred to as ‘average session duration’ in Google Analytics.

You can locate it by going to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages and setting up a new segment that exclusively shows organic traffic.

SEO Metrics Tools:

You can use a variety of techniques to assess the performance of your website.

When it comes down to it, the following four will give you all the information you need to build useful SEO reports.

Google Analytics

It should come as no surprise that Google Analytics, Google’s platform, is one of the greatest tools for analyzing your SEO effectiveness.

This tool provides more information than almost any other tool on the market. It’s also completely free.

It’s now considered a standard tool for site owners and marketers, so if you’re not currently utilizing it to track the success of your site, you should do so right away.

Google Search Console

Performance monitoring is an integral part of SEO and one of the renowned Google-owned tools for site performance monitoring is Search.

However, unlike Analytics, which focuses on how to measure on-site actions, Search Console is primarily meant to assist site owners in monitoring how their sites appear in search results.

It allows you to observe which of your pages appear in search results, as well as the click-through rate (CTR) for each page.

Conclusion

Tracking your progress is an essential component of any successful SEO plan.

You’re firing in the dark if you don’t have a report. You could be on the verge of significant advancement OR you could be adrift on a sinking ship without realizing it or having the knowledge to alter your situation.

Even if you have an SEO statistic report in place, you must track the RIGHT metrics to truly analyze your efforts. Tracking vanity metrics can only get you so far; if you want to see genuine results for your company, you’ll need big picture data.

You’ll be able to adjust and optimize your SEO campaigns to see genuine income outcomes if you have the correct data and insights. 

So, if you’re ready to have a better sense of how your SEO efforts are affecting your business, take some time to figure out which indicators are most critical for your objectives — you might be surprised by the results.

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.