10 Important SEO Metrics to Be Monitored Regularly

SEO tracking is a vital part of your marketing strategy. It is an ongoing process of determining what is working and what is not in your campaign. Recent times saw myriads of analytic platforms offering the deepest insights about a campaign. As a result, marketers are presented with a glut of information rendering them confused. They find it hard to decide which metric they should actually focus on.

Let's Discuss the 10 Most Important SEO Metrics That You Should Be Putting Your Energy on

1. Organic Traffic

They are your most precious asset as they have come to you solely because of your content. No bucks were spent to attract them. So, tracking your organic traffic gives you an insight into the actual ability of your campaign to engage with customers. If organic traffic is not coming to your website, maybe you need to revamp your entire campaign.

2. Conversions

Goals are objectives you want to fulfill to ensure the success of the campaign.

It's you who decide the goals for your campaigns. Goals may vary according to your business. You may want to make a sale, make users sign up for your newsletter, or make them participate in any event you posted. If a customer completes that goal, that is called a conversion. Tracking these conversions is both important and easy. Just set the desired goal in Google analytics and you can monitor them easily.

3. Click through Rate

The Click-through rate is an important metric for both paid and unpaid campaigns. In layman's terms, it is the percentage of people who showed some interest and clicked on you. For example, a portion of people who visited your website after seeing you on SERP, a portion of people who clicked on your ads, or a portion of email recipients who clicked on your email.

So basically it is (click/impression*100).

A low Click through rate would mean that your title or meta description needs a tweak.

Moreover, a high click-through rate would mean a highly relevant website to Google, which translates into a high rank on the SERP.

4. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the portion of people who visited one of your website’s pages from the SERP but opted out without visiting other pages or engaging with your website in any meaningful way. They may be multiple reasons for a high bounce rate. Your landing page might not be containing the information the user expected (keyword-content mismatch), your page is taking too long to open, maybe your website is not optimized for mobile phones or maybe your page looks too cluttered. Do away with all these and you will be better off.

5. Domain authority

Google has moved on from traditional metrics to rank a website but one metric still stands strong. Domain Authority. Google still wants you to do the link-building. Hence, domain authority is something you should monitor regularly. To boost your domain authority, link your website with other quality websites and make them link back to you.

Now, no one wants to be linked with something of poor quality. The same applies here. Therefore, good content is a must for effective link-building.

6. Keyword Ranking

Simply put, where do you rank for a particular keyword in the SERP?

Look where you rank for your top keywords.

Too low?

Find out what keywords searchers are using to reach you and optimize your content according to that. Put thought into your titles and meta descriptions for a better keyword-content match. All this can help you rank better for particular keywords.

7. Re-Visitors

If people are coming back to your website, that is good news. That means your SEO efforts are paying off. Hence tracking re-visitors becomes important. You can check the ‘new vs returning’ report of Google Analytics for the same.

8. Competitor Analysis

No doubt, you need to keep improving your own SEO strategy. But it is not just that. Knowing what your rivals are doing is equally important. You can capitalize on their strengths, apply their success strategy to your business and divert the traffic from them.

Everything is fair in business.

Let's take an example.

Keyword Gap Analysis: Look for the top pages of your competitors for keywords that you are not ranking for. See how they have optimized their content for that keyword. There are tools in the market to help you understand the content gap. Fill the gap and take the traffic.

9. Indexation

It is often the ignored part of the SEO strategy but can significantly impact your website’s reputation Search Engines make an index of all the pages that should be displayed in response to a particular search query. In order to be on the result page, you have to be on that index. Hence, you need to make sure that the pages you want to be displayed to the users are indexed.

Over-indexation and under-indexation are two common indexation errors that you must look out for. Over-indexation can cause private pages to become public. Under indexation can miss you out on traffic that could have come to the page, had it been indexed. Hence it is an important metric to monitor regularly.

10. Core web Vitals

Core web vitals are an important metric that Google uses to rank websites. They include LCP, FID, and CLS. Let’s understand each of them in the simplest terms.

LCP (Longest Contentful Paint)- It is the loading time of the largest content of your page on the user’s screen.

FID (First Input Delay)- It is the time taken by a page to respond to any user’s action like clicking or swiping.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)- It is the measure of the visual stability of your page.

You need to regularly monitor the scores of your page in each of the metrics and look for ways to improve them. You have various Google tools to help you with this like Google Search Console or Google Lighthouse.

Conclusion

If you are trying to rank your page, you can never be laid back. You always have to be on the go. Tracking and improving. Look for these important metrics and you will keep both the searcher and the search engine happy.