A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is only as good as the metrics that are used to track it. The right metrics serve as key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you determine whether your SEO strategy is headed in the right direction. Also, analyzing these metrics gives you an idea of how well you’ve accomplished your SEO goals.
But what metrics are you supposed to measure for your SEO strategy? If you’re working with a leading digital marketing agency, such as HighMark SEO Digital, they’ll help you identify the right metrics based on your objectives.
But if you’re managing SEO on your own, you might end up focusing on the wrong parameters. Tracking irrelevant metrics will be detrimental to your SEO strategy. You’ll likely invest your time and resources to improve metrics that provide any value. Or you might be obsessing over figures without any standardized benchmarks.
That’s why in this blog, we’ve outlined a few important SEO tracking metrics that you need to measure. Let’s get started.
When you think about SEO tracking, the first metric that’ll come to your mind is organic traffic. But measuring website traffic isn’t enough to assess how your strategy is performing. You need to determine how those organic website visitors are impacting conversions and revenue.
Alternatively, you might obsess over parameters, such as bounce rates and exit rates, to identify web pages that need improvement. But here’s the thing - a high exit rate isn’t always an indication of poor page experience.
On the contrary, if a web page has a high exit rate, it could mean that most visitors found what they were looking for and therefore, didn’t browse any other pages.
Moreover, a high bounce rate could be the result of session timeouts due to slow internet. Or it could indicate a problem with your Google Analytics configuration. Also, there aren’t any established benchmarks for what is considered a good bounce rate.
That’s why these parameters fail to paint a true picture of how your SEO strategy is performing.
Here are a few valuable metrics that you should consider for your SEO strategy:
This one’s a no-brainer. You can’t measure the performance of your SEO strategy without monitoring keyword rankings. Simply put, keyword rankings indicate where your website stands on search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords.
A steady incline in your website’s ranking for a particular keyword indicates your strategy is working well. It’ll also help attribute any traffic spikes to your SEO efforts.
The simplest way of tracking your website’s SERP ranking is to run a Google search for your target keyword. Alternatively, you can use a rank tracker tool to monitor keyword rankings.
Page experience has been becoming increasingly important in the SEO landscape. The better the user experience a website delivers, the higher it’s going to be pushed in relevant search engine results.
But if bounce rate and time-on-page aren’t as effective, how do you measure page experience? The key is to focus on Core Web Vitals - three key page experience parameters that Google has been using as minor ranking signals since June 2021.
Core Web Vitals include the following metrics:
Tracking Core Web Vitals for your website is straightforward. You simply have to log into your Google Search Console dashboard and check out the Core Web Vitals report.
When it comes to SEO tracking, marketers and website owners often make the mistake of focusing on on-page performance. What they don’t realize is that even the best on-page SEO tactics won’t yield results if your web pages aren’t indexed by search engine spiders.
That’s why it is important to track the number of indexed pages on your website. Unless you’ve deliberately prevented certain pages from being indexed, a sudden drop in the number of indexed pages could indicate technical SEO errors.
To check the number of pages that have been successfully indexed, you’ll need to access the Coverage report from your Google Search Console dashboard. While you’re at it, watch out for indexing errors to learn more about why specific pages haven’t been indexed.
Organic website traffic is a clear measure of SEO performance. But if you want to correctly analyze it, you must track other metrics, such as keyword rankings and Core Web Vitals. Also, check whether your content creation and optimization efforts are accompanied by a steady rise in the number of indexed web pages.
