What Metrics Are Important for SEO?

The good news is that there are some metrics that are absolutely essential for SEO, and they aren’t that tough to uncover. You just have to know what you’re looking for! WebFX can help you determine which metrics you need and then guide you in implementing them. You can contact us online or call 888-601-5359 today to speak with one of our experts!

If you’d like more information about why metrics matter to SEO, you can keep reading! Below are a few SEO marketing metrics that you should keep track of if you want to compete in today’s marketplace.

Inbound links

Who’s been linking to the pages of your website? And are those backlinks building up, especially to certain high-performing pages or blog posts? Take the time to evaluate your inbound links, and make sure that the majority of them come from reputable sites.

Search engines view links from other sites almost like votes for the quality of your site, so they’re extremely valuable for SEO. However, links from low-quality, spammy sites can negatively affect SEO, and it’s good to know as soon as possible, so you can ask the site to remove the link.

Traffic sources

Where are the majority of your site visitors coming from? With tools like Google Analytics, it’s easy to see if they’re finding you via search engines, clicking links on other sites, clicking links on social media, or navigating directly to your site.

This will give you an indicator of how well your different strategies are working, as well as which ones need improvement. If you run paid ads on your site, you can also use this to determine how much traffic they are generating.

Top performing pages

There’s a good chance that a handful of your pages get the bulk of your site traffic. Once you know which pages they are, you can focus your efforts on improving and optimizing them to boost conversions.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to market a bank, and you write an article titled, “How to Calculate Interest.” It generates tons of traffic, but most of the people who land on the page leave without taking any other actions. To make the page more valuable, you could add a few links to other relevant pages on your site, as well as a few calls to action.

By adding a button like, “Apply for a Loan!” you could improve the chances that the visitors convert, and increase the value of the page exponentially. And if you’re able to identify and improve 5 or 6 high-performing pages, the payoff could be huge.

Bounce rate

Whenever someone lands on one of your site pages and navigates away from your site instead of looking at other pages, they’re considered a “bounce.” The percentage of people who do so for each specific page is that page’s “bounce rate.”

This is not only a negative signal to search engines (because it indicates that visitors don’t like what they find), but also means that the content on your pages isn’t enough to make visitors convert. By looking at the bounce rates for your individual pages, you can determine which ones are underperforming, and how they can be improved.

Conversions

Many site owners make the mistake of focusing primarily on site traffic, and are then confused when their site doesn’t seem to be bringing in many new customers. That’s where conversion rate becomes important.

The fact that someone arrives at your site doesn’t necessarily mean they’re interested in the products or services you have to offer—it might just mean that your site ranks well for a certain keyword. So instead of optimizing with the goal of increasing your number of monthly site visitors, optimize with the goal of attracting qualified traffic that will convert.

This may mean choosing new keywords for some of your older pages and optimizing them for conversions, but it will be well worth the effort. Look at it this way: would you rather have 100 visitors who don’t buy anything, or 10 visitors with a 50% conversion rate? It should be a no-brainer.

SERPs

Although ranking well is ultimately the goal of many SEOs, we listed it last because page rank isn’t absolutely everything. Yes, it’s important to be on the first results page for certain long tail keywords, but trying to rank well for broad keywords that don’t generate conversions simply isn’t worth your time.

Also, considering that search engines change their algorithms regularly, and your competitors are likely optimizing for many of the same keywords, it’s hard to determine why your rankings are what they are. A drop doesn’t necessarily mean that you did something wrong—it could just mean that your competitors did something right.

So should you monitor SERPs? Yes. Is it the end of the world when they change? No. Keep that in mind, and this can be a valuable metric.

Keep in mind that you won’t jump to the top of SERPs immediately after starting an SEO campaign. SEO takes time to work, but be patient — the results are amazing!

How to improve your results

Once you start to monitor the right metrics for your site, you’ll likely notice a few areas that need improvement. Start with high traffic, low conversion pages, and work your way through your site. At the same time, continue to add new pages and optimize them in ways that will attract and convert high quality traffic.

If you don’t have the time or resources to achieve the results you want on your own, don’t hesitate to contact us! Our talented team of Internet marketers has the skill and experience to create and implement an SEO strategy that will help you grow your business.