In this article, tailored to all businesses concerned about their high bounce rates or exit rates on their website, we dive deeper into SEO metrics. While it is undeniably crucial to monitor these two and understand how your online content performs, there are far more critical indicators to focus on to make strategic decisions. We are sharing some of the key indicators to watch closely, as well as those you can afford to overlook.
Why Bother Tracking SEO Metrics at All?
Without a clear understanding of several key metrics, measuring the effectiveness of your digital or content marketing efforts can become an issue.
It is likely that your business, products, and services might not be appearing among the top results on Google and you might not be drawing enough organic traffic to your website, along with conversions, such as sales, inquiries, appointments, and so on. You can't improve these results without identifying which metrics are underperforming and how to influence them.
Which SEO Metrics Should You Really Care About?
We are often asked to explain the matter to businesses that are getting lost in a sea of analytics and dashboards, asking for more than just charts and numbers. Now let’s reveal the SEO metrics that truly deserve your attention with the help of Neil Patel’s marketing blog.
Backlinks and Domain Authority
If you wonder what a backlink is just look back to the previous paragraph. Neil Patel just got one more backlink to his website from ours. If you also create quality content linked to by authoritative websites, this would really boost the SEO rating of your webpages in the eyes of search engines. Here is a possible tool to check how many backlinks there are to your website at the moment: https://neilpatel.com/backlinks/
Now, as you can measure backlinks to your site, you can also increase their number through:
- Quality content in your website and blog
- Guest blogging - invite content creators outside your business to create a blog post for your brand
- Add user comments to your blog posts
- Collaborate with other businesses in your niche
The higher number of backlinks would also increase the domain authority of your website which is also a key SEO factor. Mind that we only speak about quality backlinks from reputable websites. Paying for or overloading with backlinks would not help you mislead search engines and will never result in a positive outcome for your online presence.
Organic Traffic
Here we mean all users who find and visit your website without any paid campaigns - on social media, other networks, or through search engines. This is also one of the indicators speaking a lot about the quality of the job you have done in terms of SEO.
Organic traffic is key simply because there is a greater chance for users coming organically to your website to convert in comparison with those attracted through paid advertising.
The easiest way to monitor organic traffic to your website is through the most popular analytics tool - Google Analytics 4 (GA4) under the “Acquisition” tab.
Keyword Rankings
Ranking by targeted keywords on search engines is one of the main SEO tactics used by businesses online. Usually their main keywords include products, services, companies or matters that are of greatest importance for their users. Here is why it is important to monitor how your web pages rank for the top keywords you consider valuable.
According to Ahrefs, over ⅔ of clicks from organic traffic go to the first 3 results in search engines, and this is a very good reason to attempt ranking higher.
The easiest way to understand which keywords generate organic traffic to your website is through the Google Search Console tool.
Speed and Performance of a Website
Your website pages’ loading time is also crucial for its SEO. Users tend to pay less and less attention to a single piece of online content and ¼ would even exit your website if a page loads slower than 3 seconds.
Pingdom is one of the tools that can help you test and measure your website’s speed loaded from different locations worldwide. If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, mind that you might be missing opportunities for your business such as unhappy customers or lower number of conversions.
Here we can also mention another technical aspect of SEO - Core Web Vitals. Simply put, this is a report by Google focused on several indicators from your website that are critical to determine its ranking on search engines compared to the one of other businesses in your niche. Here is how the report looks like and what the criteria inside means:
| Indicator | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Good | Needs Improvement | Poor | |
| LCP | <= 2,5 s | <= 4 s | > 4 s |
| FID | <= 100 ms | <= 300 ms | > 300 ms |
| INP | <= 200 ms | <= 500 ms | >500 ms |
| CLS | <= 0,1 | <= 0,25 | >0,25 |
And here are these indicators translated into human language:
- Large Contentful Paint (LCP) - the time to load the main content of a web page which is crucial for the good user experience.
- First Input Delay (FID) - the time needed for a response by the browser after the first interaction of the user with the content.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - the visual stability of your website and the shift of elements on its pages.
- Interaction to Next Paing (INP) - the page’s general responsiveness when a user interacts with it.
It is obvious that search engine optimization is also related to technical aspects to a great extent. If you have already discovered that your website is not working well, is not fast enough, and is not favored by users and search engines, then put effort to optimize files and images on pages, limit redirects and apply content caching tools.
Conversions
One of the SEO metrics that have the highest business value is the number of conversions - sales, orders, signups, calls, enrollments, etc. This number is truly speaking about the effectiveness from the digital marketing activities conducted by your brand. Which are the types of conversions on your website and what is its role for your business? Make sure you have the answer to these questions to understand how your website serves your general sales and marketing strategy. Have in mind that the high traffic to your site and its proper functioning are good, but mean nothing when the conversions count is poor.
SEO Metrics Getting Too Much Attention
While the already mentioned indicators provide meaningful and actionable insights, there are other popular metrics that are somehow overrated. Here is what we mean:
Bounce Rate
Known as “the nightmare” for digital marketers, the high bounce rate is often misunderstood. It shows the percentage of users who have left a web page without interacting with it. This may hint for a potential UX issue, but the good news is that it is not a SEO ranking factor itself.
Also, bounce rate does not give you specific information that tells you what exactly you need to change to improve your website’s optimization for search engines. Here is why we recommend focusing less on it, since the better figures here will not guarantee higher position among your results in Google, but would definitely take a lot from your time.
Average Session Duration
It is natural to always strive for improving this indicator. Have in mind that low session duration does not necessarily mean a problem with your website. Users are searching online responses and solutions and it is possible that they may have found such faster than expected. But you can’t ask them to spend all their time online on your website, can you?
We hope this article may serve as a base guideline to measure the effectiveness from the search engine optimization of your online business. Invest in monitoring and improving the mentioned SEO metrics and you will eventually get the attention of search engines and, most importantly, of users.
Turn to the DGTalents team for a free SEO audit of your website that will measure performance and allow for planning its optimization.
