Top 10 SEO metrics to measure
Why is it important to measure SEO metrics?
Without defining, monitoring, and analysing the SEO metrics that matter for your business, you won’t ever know if your SEO efforts are worth it!
Top Ten SEO metrics to measure
1. Organic traffic
Aka the number of people who click on your site that you didn’t pay to get there. People who found your site via a search engine, not through an advert.
In case it’s not obvious: you want this measurement to be increasing.
2. Keyword rankings
This is how you find out where your website ranks in the search results for a particular keyword that you have chosen as a key one for you.
Choose a few keywords that are relevant to your site to measure. The more relevant to you the word is, the better!
3. Search visibility
This gets a bit more techy… search visibility measures the percentage of users who have clicked onto your site after completing a search that used one of your tracked keywords.
It helps you work out how visible your business is compared to others who also use the key keywords you are using. You get to work out what your competition is and whether you are winning.
4. Conversions
Arguably the most important of the metrics to measure is organic conversions.
A conversion might be a sale, a donation, someone subscribing to a newsletter or downloading an information pack. It’s an action that will make money for your business or organisation.
It’s a straightforward way of measuring the success of your SEO efforts.
You can set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics to help you produce reports that are easy to read and analyse.
5. User engagement
User engagement metrics are made up of many different forms of data (it’s never straight forward is it?) such as:
bounce rate
average time on page
pages per session
What you choose to measure depends on what your website is offering…
For example, if you have lots of pages on your website with long sections of informational content, high average times on a page is a good thing. People are taking in your content!
Read more about all data that can help you measure user engagement.
6. Indexing - pages and coverage errors
An indexed page is one that a search engine has in its index.
Think about it like this: if a search engine hasn’t acknowledged (indexed) your page, then it doesn’t know it exists. If it doesn’t know it exists - how can a search engine recommend it to a user?
You want your key pages indexed. You want a search engine to discover them and deem them worthy enough to appear in their index. So, when you measure indexed pages - you want that number to accurately reflect the number of pages on your website.
The number of pages that have index coverage errors is also important to measure.
Index coverage errors prevent your pages from being indexed. It’s important to measure the errors and fix them.
We know that this sounds overwhelming, which is why we’re going to pause this list here to remind you that Wild SEO Agency is simply one contact form submission away from giving you advice, help and support in measuring your SEO metrics.
7. Return on Investment
Return on investment (ROI) refers to the amount of money you get back from the money you invest.
You obviously want a positive ROI to confirm that the money you’ve spent optimising your website, or on a digital marketing budget, is paying off!
8. Website health score
There are multiple Free SEO Audit tools to help you figure out how many internal URLs on your website have technical SEO errors.
We recommend Ahrefs’ Site Audit — but get in touch with us if you’d like a more in-depth audit (it’s kind of one of our ‘things’).
Measuring your health score regularly helps you to see if the SEO changes you are making are having an impact.
9. Number of backlinks
Backlinks refer to the hyperlinks on other websites that direct people to your website. Search engines see these links as proof that other sites and businesses trust you.
Backlinks are one of Google’s top factors for ranking websites. The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your website, the better.
We’ve written about backlinks on our blog. Learn how to use backlinks on your site to gain respect with search engines and users alike.
10. Customer lifetime value
CLV is a predictive measure of the total amount of profit you could earn from a customer during their relationship with your organisation or business.
This SEO metric shows the long-term value of each visitor to your website that you convert into a customer.
Measuring CLV will help you to choose where to invest in SEO on your website.
For example: if you find that customers who donate smaller amounts to your charity end up earning you more over the course of their relationship with you, you may want to design your donation page towards encouraging smaller donations.
Help with measuring SEO metrics
What use is a list of SEO metrics to measure if you don’t know how to start measuring?
Never fear, Wild SEO Agency is here. Have a look at the SEO services we provide and let us know what you’d like to start improving and measuring.
If you don’t even know yet, please get in touch with your questions anyway - there’s no silly question.