Our Top 3 Metrics to Track for SEO

SEO / 15 Jan 2022

You’ve committed to making your website’s SEO a strategic priority this year. You’re creating and publishing quality content like there’s no tomorrow. Still, you’re finding measuring performance against your goals to be a bit of a drag. There’s so much data in your Google Analytics dashboard that it’s hard to know what to do with it. Especially when you’re short on time (business as usual for a busy agency owner).

Below we share our top three metrics for tracking SEO performance against strategic goals. Hint: it’s about more than just keywords, which, believe it or not, aren’t the be-all and end-all of a well-performing SEO strategy.

Contact us to talk white label SEO or SEO copywriting services if you want to learn more.

1.   Your Website’s Organic Traffic

First and foremost, your SEO strategy is about attracting more organic traffic to your website to wow, delight, and convert into paying clients. To do that, you need to know that your content attracts the right people for the right reasons.

Keywords

Keywords are a part of the SEO puzzle, not the whole puzzle. Thoughtful, thorough keyword research is a must. Google Search Console’s Performance module shows you which search terms your visitors use to find you and how well those terms perform.

Impressions

Your number of impressions is the number of times your site appeared in a search. Impressions aren’t clicks, but a growing number of impressions indicates that your potential visibility has increased for a particular term.

Click-Through Rate

This represents the percentage of people who saw your site in a search and visited your site. The higher your search engine ranking for a particular term, the higher your click-through rate becomes.

Domain Authority

A website’s domain authority score isn’t an official Google ranking factor. It indicates the likelihood of a site’s ability to rank based on its expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. A popular site with a higher domain authority score (50-100) tends to rank better for search queries because search engines believe the content is trustworthy.

New Referring Domains

One way to build a website’s domain authority score is via another website, preferably websites, referring to it as a credible source of information. Links between websites are known as backlinks. Your domain authority increases with every credible site that links back to yours, thus improving your SEO ranking abilities. 

Tracking the numbers of new referring domains and taking opportunities to create more (guest blogging, podcast appearances etc.) is a great way to increase your domain authority and get your content before a wider audience.

2.   Your Visitors’ Behaviour

SEO means optimising your site for the right visitors. A well-executed SEO strategy ensures that your conversions increase with your organic traffic. Understanding your visitors, their behaviour, and their journeys become very important.

Acquisition

You can view where your web traffic is coming from via Search Console’s Acquisition report. It tells you whether your website traffic is finding you directly, via organic search, or referral from social media, email newsletters, or other sources.

Google Analytics can determine the average number of pages viewed per traffic type, which traffic sources perform best, and areas for further inspection.

Average Session Duration

Within Google Analytics, you can view the average time users spend on your website to see when and where visitors engage with your content and where they exit.

User Journey

Analytics’ Behaviour module helps map your users’ journeys against your predictions. It creates opportunities to look at your overall website structure to ensure you’re offering the best possible user experience for your prospects.

3.   Your Website’s Core Performance

Since Google’s core web vitals update in 2020, website performance across devices and outstanding user experience are increasingly important elements of Google’s algorithm and will significantly impact a website’s ability to rank in 2022.  Core web vitals lay the foundation for your content, so any SEO strategy worth its salt must address these factors head-on.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is the number of people who visit one page of your website, then click off immediately without engaging with its content. When your core web vitals are out of whack, typically, users respond by bouncing. Your bounce rate is a helpful indicator that something’s not right. Perhaps your load speed is too slow, a broken link or button, or an irritating pop-up. Also worth exploring is whether your content matches a user’s search intent.

Page Load Speeds

A fast loading page is crucial to reducing bounce rates, particularly mobile devices – 1.5 seconds is the ideal speed. All images should be fully optimised and compressed to a suitable size to ensure smooth loading. Because, honestly, there’s nothing more frustrating than the blue circle of death on a desktop or the unmoving blue loading bar on mobile.

Responsiveness

Your website should be responsive to your user’s clicks. If they want to follow a link, the transition should be immediate (well, milliseconds) to ensure a brilliant user experience. Because – as above – blue circle of death.

There You Have It

Three core means of assessing the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and the associated metrics to help you do so quickly and conveniently from within your Google Analytics and Serch Console dashboard.

Want To Work Together?

Beesting Digital’s white label SEO professionals are expert trackers. Their speciality is using SEO data to construct compelling copy, a user experience to die for, and website performance that’s second to none. So you can focus on converting all those incoming prospects.

Talk to us about white label SEO or SEO copywriting services today.