SEO is important for your website. But your SEO efforts can go in vain if you don't know how to measure SEO performance. Here are the 9 crucial factors to measure SEO performance that will help you measure SEO success and track your SEO progress.
Follow these tips to see your SEO efforts are fruitful or a waste
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the number of visitors your site generates from people clicking on your webpages when they come up from search engine results. This is when, searchers type a question, word, or string of words into a search engine, and they get a set of results showing your website in relation to their search query.
Organic search traffic is targeted as you want your website to appear on top or atleast on the first page of the SERP, for a keyword. If it does, your SEO is working.
Keyword Ranking
Do a Google search, this is a simple way to track your Google ranking for keywords related to your business or products. This shows where your website ranks for your included keywords.
Try all your targeted keywords and see where your website is placed for the input keyword in the search result.
Remember your target keywords must acquire top spots in SERP, if yes, your keywords are fetching results.
SERP Visibility
Search engine visibility measures how many people see your website in the search results, which could be affected by the authority of the SERP features. But overall, this metric gives you a bird’s eye view of your SEO progress. You can easily check your website’s visibility through website tracking tool to measure your SEO performance.
Click-Through Rate
Another factor to measure SEO performance is the click-through rate (CTR). The CTR represents the percentage of users who clicked on your website from the SERP. For example, your CTR is 10% if your site appeared on a results page 100 times in a week, and 10 people clicked on it.
CTR also works as a barometer of how effective your title tags and meta descriptions are in attracting users' attention. You can check how your meta tags are performing by checking the Search Console.
Bounce Rate
This is serious damage. It is always advisable to keep it as low as possible. The bounce rate represents the percentage of users who visit your site but leave without further interaction.
Google Analytics counts a visit as an interaction if the user clicks on more than one page.
In a nutshell, it measures the quality of a visit. If the bounce rate is high, you need to work on your content and SEO.
Backlinks
Backlinks are another factor to measure SEO success. Backlinks are one of Google’s top-ranking factors for websites. A study suggests that more backlink leads to URL on the first position than the second.
Monitoring your backlinks will give you valuable insight into the progress of your link-building strategies.
You should also pay attention to the list of links you didn’t build yourself. They can be potential link opportunities you can explore in the future.
Page Speed
When measuring your SEO, one of the important factors is Page speed. Page speed is an important element that affects most of the other metrics. Page speed does not only help to enhance your website’s ranking, but it also impacts your conversion and bounce rates.
Google’s new page speed industry benchmarks also confirmed a big correlation between fast websites and low bounce rates. It stated that as page load times go up, the chance of someone leaving your site increases.
So keep an eye on your Page speed to increase your SEO effectiveness
Time Spent on Page
Also called Session Duration is the time user spends on a specific web page. With this info, you can understand which pages are engaging more users. When a person types a keyword on Google looking for specific information and lands on your page and stays for a long period, it means your site satisfied their intent.
This is a good indicator that your content meets visitors' expectations based on the keywords you used to lead them to your site. Check in the analytics section if this session duration is high, if it is, then your SEO is on track.
Conversion Rate
Finally and ultimately, the reason why we create a website, product or service is conversion rate. Conversion rate represents the overall impact of your SEO strategy on your business’s sales.
One could say that this is the most important metric in assessing your website’s success.
One way to track your conversion rates is to set up custom goals in Google Analytics. If the stats meet your conversion goals...your SEO is perfect.