When it comes to search engine optimization, there are numerous benefits that it can provide for your business. One of these is that you have a long list of items that determines the success of your campaign. These same metrics can help you develop new strategies or modify your existing plans. But which ones are the most important to track for you? This can vary based on what your key goals are. Here are some of the key SEO metrics to consider.
Organic Traffic
The biggest and most obvious tracking element is organic traffic, or the traffic you get from search engine results pages without paying for ad placement. As traffic can come from a variety of sources, focusing specifically on organic search gives you an idea of your SEO strategy’s direct impact. If your strategy is successful, the number of visitors to your site via search should increase steadily.
CTR
Once your site appears in search engines, you want to know how many people are clicking from those listings to your site. This is where click-through rates come in. This is the percentage of people that visit your website from your listing. For example, if you are viewed by 500 people and 50 of them click through to your site, it is a CTR of 10%. A CTR can be calculated from both organic and paid searches. If your campaign is receiving a lower CTR than you would like, you may need to modify your listing’s title and meta description or review if it is linking to a page that doesn’t have enough relevant content.
Keyword Rankings
Another metric that gives you an early sign of the status of your campaign is how your keywords rank. This can help you understand the market share of your current keyword selections as well as the opportunities available for each term. Keyword research is beneficial for understanding the terms that people are searching for when it comes to your product or service. You can also tailor search terms based on what phase of the buying process a customer is in. While it is completely normal for a keyword’s ranking to fluctuate, any steep, sudden drop may need to be investigated.
Bounce Rate
You may not think that how fast your website loads can be a factor in an overall SEO ranking, but it is. A site’s load time is associated with bounce rate, which is a measurement of the percentage of people who visit a website and perform no actions on the page they entered. The longer it takes a site to load, the higher the associated bounce rate. You can prevent this not just by improving how fast your site loads, but by creating quality content that encourages visitors to learn more and removing anything that prevents a solid user experience, like pop-ups or non-intuitive navigation.
There are numerous elements to consider when running an SEO campaign. With so many metrics that have an impact on your campaign’s success, it can feel overwhelming at times. The good news is that it’s easy to keep up with these metrics depending on your platform, meaning you have the ability to monitor and adjust your campaign as needed for optimal performance.