10 Important SEO Performance Indicators To Track
A digital presence is an essential component of your inbound marketing strategy. Therefore, implementing an effective SEO strategy is a powerful start to boosting your website’s visibility, increasing organic traffic, and attracting new customers.
In Semrush’s State of Content Marketing Report, it was determined that SEO remains one of the most effective digital marketing tactics.
But having an SEO strategy and implementing it is only the first step, you also need to track the results.
In this guide, we’ll cover basic metrics that marketers can use to measure SEO performance and results.
How Do You Measure SEO?
There are hundreds of metrics you can track, Google uses more than 200 ranking factors in its algorithm. But it’s best to focus on a few things to get started.
Establish which metrics are most important to your business and monitor them regularly.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the number of visitors your website generates from people clicking on your web pages when they come from search engine results.
Organic traffic is what you want for your website because it is targeted, that person is looking for something specific.
And if you can provide a solution, you will gain new subscribers or customers.
It is also an effective indicator of the overall progress of your SEO strategy. The improvement in organic search results means that your website’s visibility through keyword ranking has increased.
If you want a holistic view of your website against your competitors’ traffic sources.
Take a look at Semrush’s Domain Overview and Traffic Analysis tools, both can help you better understand your organic traffic and how your audience is accessing your site.
Start with Domain Overview, where you’ll get a high-level view of your traffic over time, including an analysis of organic vs paid traffic. You can consider up to five competing domains.
Keyword Ranking
A keyword is a term that includes anything searched on a search engine. A word or phrase is considered a keyword if it generates a results page on Google or any other search engine.
To see results with this metric, your website and content need to be optimized to rank on search engine results for specific keywords and long-tail keywords.
A simple way to track Google rankings for keywords related to your business or product is to do a Google search.
The results will tell you where your site ranks for the aforementioned competitive keywords.
The ultimate goal is to be on the first page and as close to the top of Google as possible, with more than 25% of people clicking on the first Google search result.
To better understand your keyword performance and discover new relevant searches, you will want to conduct a Keyword Gap analysis.
With up to five competing URLs, they can help you determine for which keywords you’re ranking strongly.
The keywords you are weak and the untapped keywords that your competitors are gaining search engine rankings for, but there is still some potential for your domain.
SERP
For every query, Google generates a result or a search engine results page (SERP). These results include organic results, ads, and SERP features. Examples of SERP features include featured snippets (instant answers), knowledge panels, and image packs.
Search engine visibility measures how many people see your website in search results. This may be affected by the authority of the SERP features.
But overall, this metric gives you an overview of your SEO progress.
CTR
Click-through rate (CTR) represents the percentage of users who clicked on your website from the SERP.
For example, your CTR is 10% of your site appeared on the results page 100 times in a week and 10 people clicked on it.
Use this metric as a measure of how effective title tags and meta descriptions are in capturing user attention.
Don’t be discouraged if you see low numbers in this indicator. It just means you need to optimize meta description, title, URL and try to get some featured snippets that are relevant to your business.
The average click-through rate for the first position in Google is 28.5%, so increasing your keyword ranking can also increase your click-through rate.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate represents the percentage of users who visited your website but left without further interaction.
Google Analytics counts a visit as an interaction if the user clicks on more than one page. In a nutshell, it measures the quality of a visit.
Different types of websites have different benchmark bounce rates. bounce rate tracking can also tell you whether your lead magnet, content, or site layout appeals to your target market.
Using our traffic analysis tool, you can easily check your domain’s bounce rate by the device.
And if you have seen any recent improvement by looking at the last six months, 12 months, and all time.
Domain Authority Over Time
Your site’s authority score predicts how well a domain will rank. SEMrush Authority Score is measured on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 100, and higher numbers mean more traffic and better rankings.
A low number can reduce traffic and rankings. Use the domain authority score to compare your site with your competitors and modify your SEO strategy to score higher than them.
New sites will always start with an authority score of 1, sites that take time to build Authority.
Backlinks and gain regular high organic traffic will mostly be in the 40-60 range.
This stat will also move slowly, so don’t be discouraged if your efforts don’t seem to yield immediate results.
Backlink
Backlinks are one of the top Google ranking factors for websites.
In one study, we found that 2.2 times more backlinks lead to the URL in the first position than the URL in the second position, that’s what we call a “massive spike”.
Therefore, backlinks should be on the list of metrics you are tracking.
Tracking your backlinks will give you valuable insight into the progress of your link-building strategies. You should also pay attention to the list of links that you do not build yourself.
They can be potential link opportunities that you might explore in the future.
Page Speed
Page speed is an important factor that affects most other metrics. This study by Portent found that when you increase the speed of your site from two seconds to one second. Your amount per pageview doubles.
Page speed is not only an important factor for your site’s ranking, but it also affects your conversion rates and bounces.
Google’s new page speed industry benchmark has established a strong correlation between fast websites and low bounce rates.
They found that as page load times increase, the likelihood of someone leaving your site increases.
A website that takes 10 seconds to load means that the bounce rate will increase to about 120%.
Time On-Site
This performance metric is all about how well your content meets user intent.
When a person enters a keyword on Google to search for specific information, a product or service comes to your page and spends a lot of time there.
That means your website has satisfied its intent, a high time spent on page score is a good indicator that your content is meeting your visitors’ expectations based on the keywords you used to lead them to your site.
You can measure if the time spent on a page is too short by comparing it to your own average reading time. But also keep in mind the goal of the page.
Time spent on a 60-second page is great but not good for a long post. So if the average visitor is your average reading time. It’s safe to say that your content meets the user’s intent.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate represents the overall impact of your SEO strategy on your business’ sales.
Arguably this is the most important metric to gauge the success of your website.
Finally, you have a website to showcase your services or products and convert leads into sales.
One way to track your conversion rate is to set up custom goals in Google Analytics. You can create goals using one of their pre-configured templates.
From there, you can enter goals for your visitors. Such as reading an article, watching a video, becoming an email subscriber, signing up for a course.
And any other action that turns a visitor into a subscriber or customer.
With that, you can track the percentage of your website visitors that take any action and convert.
You can also use the same information to customize your website design, content, or offers to attract more visitors to become customers or subscribers.
You can use the global average website conversion rate of 4.31% based on multiple market conversion rates as a basis.
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