SEO metrics such as rankings are great, but what matters most is SEO’s impact on business growth.
This means you can only understand SEO’s value if you track the right metrics and how it can increase revenue.
Your metrics should focus on:
In this article, we’ve categorized important metrics to focus on at a high level.
Here are some user engagement metrics to track:
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who return to the SERP, or exit the webpage (and your site) without interacting with another page on your website. A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors are not finding what they want on your site, which causes them to exit quickly.
Bounce rate helps you fix issues such as:
Check your Google Analytics 4 for the percentage of single-page visits and divide that by the total number of visits. The result is a percentage of your bounce rate.
For example, if your website received 500 visitors and 100 interacted with more than one page, then 400 visitors bounced. Therefore, your bounce rate would be 80% (400 single-page visits / 500 total visits times 100).
Read more: 20 Proven Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate.
Engaged session duration measures the amount of time a user actively spends on your website during an engaged session. This metric indicates how long users interact with your content before leaving the site or becoming inactive.
For example, if a user searches for “best running shoes,” clicks on your link, spends three minutes reading your content, and continues to interact with other parts of your site, the engaged session duration is three minutes.
Engaged sessions per user is a metric that measures how frequently users interact meaningfully with your website.
In Google Analytics, an engaged session is defined by user activity that includes spending a certain amount of time on the site, viewing multiple pages, or completing specific actions like form submissions or purchases.
For example, if a user lands on your homepage, spends more than a minute exploring your content, clicks on a product page, and completes a form, this counts as an engaged session.
Google Analytics provides this metric directly, but to calculate it manually, divide the total number of engaged sessions by the number of unique users.
For example, if your website had 50,000 engaged sessions and 20,000 unique users in a month, engaged sessions per user equals 50,000 divided by 20,000 (2.5).
This means, on average, each user had 2.5 engaged sessions during that month.
Read more: Essential GA4 Reports You Need To Measure Your SEO Campaigns.
Here are helpful conversion metrics to track:
The organic conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who find your website through organic search results and complete a desired action. This could be
Or any other goal that moves them further along the customer journey.
This metric shows how SEO drives valuable clicks that contribute to your business objectives.
For context, the organic conversion rate equals the number of conversions divided by the number of organic visitors multiplied by 100.
This means if 500 out of 10,000 organic visitors complete the desired action, the conversion rate would be 5%.
Read more: What Is Conversion Rate & How Do You Calculate It?
A goal completion is recorded whenever a user completes a specific action you’ve defined as valuable. The actions could be the same metrics bulleted out in the previous point.
Goal completions matter because they tell if your SEO is driving the right traffic and if visitors are taking the actions you want them to take.
For this article, we’ll use GA4, and tracking looks like this:
In ecommerce, a conversion is completing a desired action that generates revenue.
The most apparent conversion is a purchase, but other valuable actions include adding items to a cart, creating an account, or subscribing to emails.
If you enable enhanced ecommerce in GA4, it’ll track the entire customer journey (from product view to purchase).
UTM parameters will identify the blog post as the conversion source, your attribution model will assign credit to the post, and your CRM can link the purchase to the user’s profile for further analysis.
Follow this process to track ecommerce sales on Google Analytics 4.
Here are some traffic metrics to prioritize:
Organic traffic volume is the number of visitors arriving at your website through unpaid search results – organic clicks from search engine result pages (SERPs).
High organic traffic indicates that search engines consider your website relevant and authoritative for your target keywords.
This way, as long as you write quality content, your website will convert users without relying on paid advertising.
Log into GA4 and go to Acquisition Reports. Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition.
This report provides a detailed breakdown of your traffic sources, including organic search.
Organic traffic value goes beyond numbers to assess the actual worth of visitors your SEO efforts attract. It quantifies the potential revenue or business impact of your organic traffic.
Organic traffic value is ROI-focused; it answers the question, “What is the monetary value of the organic traffic we’re getting?”
The answer then informs decisions on how to allocate marketing resources.
You can either use the cost-per-click (CPC), conversion-based value, or the customer lifetime value (LTV) metrics:
If your website receives 1,000 organic clicks per month for a keyword with an average CPC of $2, the estimated organic traffic value would be $2,000.
For example, if your average customer from organic search makes three purchases per year with an average order value of $100 and remains a customer for two years, their LTV would be $600.
Technical SEO metrics provide insights into your website’s infrastructure to ensure search engines can access, crawl, and index your content. Here are some metrics to focus on:
Crawl errors occur when search engine bots (like Googlebot) encounter issues while crawling pages on your website.
These errors can prevent search engines from understanding your content, potentially leading to lower rankings and visibility in SERPs.
Head to Google Search Console (GSC). Go to Index > Coverage to see a list of crawl errors and warnings. Click on each error for more details, including the affected URLs and the error type. Then, prioritize the most critical errors, such as 404 errors on essential pages.
You can also check your server logs for crawl errors that might not appear in GSC.
Indexation status refers to whether or not a specific webpage has been added to a search engine’s index.
When a page is indexed, it appears in search results when users search for relevant queries. In contrast, if a page is not indexed, it’s invisible to search engines and won’t be found by users.
Site speed is the time a website’s content takes to load and become fully interactive for users. Think of it as the digital stopwatch that measures the responsiveness and efficiency of your website.
Read More:
This explores how effective your content is via:
Content engagement measures users’ level of interaction and involvement with your web pages.
It goes beyond passive consumption and delves into how visitors actively engage with your content to indicate genuine interest and value.
Content shares, or social signals, are the number of times your content is shared across social media platforms.
Social shares indicate that your content is valuable and worthy of being shared and can amplify reach, build brand awareness, and attract backlinks.
Backlinks, on the other hand, are links from external websites that point to your web pages. Quality backlinks from other authoritative sites act as “votes of confidence” and signal to search engines that your content is trustworthy and authoritative.
High-quality backlinks can boost rankings, drive referral traffic from other websites, and increase your domain authority.
To track social shares, use the built-in analytics tools provided by social media platforms to track the number of shares, likes, comments, and overall engagement for your content. You can also use third-party tools like Hootsuite or Buffer.
To track backlinks, use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to see your total backlinks, referring domains, and link quality.
Read more:
Local SEO ensures your business appears when users search for products or services in your geographic area. Let’s start with getting insights from Google Business.
Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free tool for businesses to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps.
GBP Insights provides valuable data on how customers find and interact with your business listing.
Log in to your GBP account and click the Insights tab. Look for the section titled How customers search for your business.
You’ll see a breakdown of:
In the same Insights tab, look for the section called Where customers view your business on Google. It will show whether customers find your listing more often in Search results or Maps.
Also, check for customer actions in the Insights tab. Here, you can track website visits, calls directly from your listing, and direct requests to your location. This data reveals how customers engage with your business after finding your listing.
Other data to track include photo views and search queries.
Local search rankings refer to your business’s position in the SERPs for queries with local intent.
These searches include location-specific keywords like “coffee shops near me” or “best dentist in Albany.”
Local search results often include a map pack (a group of three to four businesses displayed on a map) and organic listings.
Read more on how to rank for Local Pack SEO.
Customer reviews and ratings provide valuable customer feedback about their experiences with your business, products, or services.
These reviews are often publicly accessible on Google, Yelp, Facebook, and industry-specific review sites.
Competitive benchmarking in SEO involves identifying, analyzing, and comparing your website’s performance to that of your top competitors in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
This helps you uncover your strengths and weaknesses, discover opportunities, and make data-driven decisions.
Some competitor performance metrics to analyze include:
Read more: SEO Competitive Analysis: The Definitive Guide.
Rankings are great, but conversions pay the bills.
Conversions are important they determine the efficacy of all your marketing efforts.
Tracking these metrics (and how they contribute to sales) will help you intensify marketing efforts on the strategies that work and allocate budgets effectively.
More resources:
Featured Image: Deemerwha studio/Shutterstock
In article screenshots taken by author
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