It is essential to measure SEO metrics in order to demonstrate the efficacy of your optimizations.
It’s important to have a good understanding of SEO when trying to get budget from clients or justify the spend to executives. It can also help to land new clients and keep existing clients happy.
There are a lot of different SEO platforms and solutions that you can use to measure your performance and ensure that you are meeting your business goals. Here are some of the most important enterprise-level metrics that you should be tracking.
1. ROI
We live in a changed world due to COVID.
Many brands are cautious with their spending and monitor every dollar they spend on marketing closely.
To calculate the ROI of SEO, you need to start by looking at business goals. This will help you determine how much value SEO brings to your company. If you want to grow your ecommerce brand by 30% each year, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy.
In order to demonstrate the ROI of your work to a client, you will need to know specific details about their business model and how they generate revenue. For example, if they are an ecommerce company, you will need to know how their sales are doing in order to show how your work has contributed to that.
- Average order value.
- Conversion rates.
- Current rankings and traffic.
- SEO spend.
ROI of SEO can be calculated by taking the organic traffic, conversion rate, and average order value then dividing it by the cost of SEO.
Calculate Keyword Value Equation For Ecommerce Website
Revenue is determined by a number of factors, the most important being search volume, ranking position, click-through-rate, conversion rate, and average order value.
Equation For Lead Generation Website
Revenue is based on search volume, ranking position, click-through-rate, conversion rate, lead-to-customer rate, and customer LTV.
2. Brand vs. Non-Brand Visibility
If your SEO platform can track performance at the keyword level, it’s important to compare brand vs. non-brand visibility and conversions.
Many websites get a lot of traffic and conversions from keywords that are associated with the website’s brand.
If your client ranks number one for branded keywords that they didn’t before, they can expect to see more revenue, as branded keywords tend to have more purchase intent.
If you see an increase in the number of keywords driving traffic, it means your SEO strategies are working, especially if you’re also seeing an increase in sales and revenue.
3. Domain Authority / Domain Rating
Domain Authority / Domain Rating is a score used by most major integrated SEO tools to calculate the overall SEO strength of a website. The score is based on a number of factors including number of backlinks, quality of referring domains, and more.
The score is based on a logarithmic scale, with a range from 0 to 100. It is difficult to increase a score by one point when the score is already high, compared to when the score is low. All other factors being equal, a website with a higher score is likely to rank higher in search results than one with a lower score.
Domain Authority is not a metric that is used by Google to rank websites. It is still important to monitor this metric even though it is based on ranking factors. The higher your Domain Authority, the more likely you are to show up at the top of the search results.
4. On-page Optimization Scores
On-page optimization is making sure that both users and search engines can understand the contents of a page. The Ahrefs Site Audit tool helps you optimize your pages for SEO by providing a score that reflects how well the page is optimized. The score may take into account things like:
- Keyword density
- Keywords in headings and subheadings
- Instances of related keywords
- Related keywords in headings and subheadings
- Internal and external linking
- The meta description
- URL
- Canonical URL
- Page title
- Image alt tags
5. Text Readability SEO Metrics
There are many metrics that SEOs use to measure the success of their campaigns, including authority scores, backlinks, page views, traffic data, and target keyword rankings. Although metrics are important, it is also vital to keep track of content quality. So what are some ways you can track the quality of site content?
It’s important for users that texts are both readable and relevant, as this creates a smoother experience. Additionally, search engines prefer texts that are easy to understand. succinctly, content that can be acted on with definitive next steps is more useful than superfluous information.
Fortunately, there are ways to measure content quality.
The readability score provided by Yoast gives you a grade based on the Flesch reading ease score. In addition, Yoast recommends using shorter sentences, paragraphs and sections, as well as active voice and transition words. It’s not because those are ranking factors. It’s because they make your text easier to digest.
Other tools like Clearscope analyze competitor content for relevant search terms and entities. Including more relevant terms from their list will result in a higher grade.
6. Impressions
If your page appears in a Google search result, it is counted as an impression, even if the user does not scroll down to see your listing. Impressions are a good way to measure how your SEO campaign is doing. As rankings improve, impressions will increase. As you approach the top 3Spotify rankings, you will see an increase in traffic.
You can easily track the number of times your listing appears in Google search results through Google Search Console’s “Performance” module.
To be clear, an impression is not the same thing as a click. Some people might call these metrics “vanity metrics” because they don’t directly result in more website visitors or income. An impression is a metric that records how many times a particular page from your site appears in the SERP.
7. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is the ratio of views to clicks. The percentage of times that someone clicks on your web page after seeing it in the Google search engine results page. If 100 searchers see your listing in the search results and one person clicks on it, you have a CTR of 1%. You can track your click-through rate (CTR) in Google Search Console’s “Performance” module.
There is a strong relationship between a website’s ranking position and the percentage of users who click on that website when they see it in a search engine results list. If you want to earn more clicks, you need to rank higher on average. Although most people click on the first page of Google, the majority of traffic comes from the top three positions on the page.
Here are some quick tips to improve your CTR on particular pages:
- Match your page title to search intent.
- Include a compelling CTA within your title if possible.
- Use brackets, dashes, or pipes to make your title stand out.
- Craft meta descriptions that entice users to click and read more.
- Evoke an emotional response through your title and meta description.
- Explain what they’ll walk away with after visiting your page.
- Use structured data to improve the way your page displays in search results.
- Use short, descriptive URLs that contain the primary keyword.
8. Backlinks And Referring Domains
Having a lot of backlinks from high-quality websites is still an important ranking factor.
The number of backlinks to your site is not as important as the quality and relevancy of the sites linking to it.
If you are Nike and get a lot of links from good sites related to sneakers, shoes, and apparel, it will help improve your rankings because relevance and quality are key factors in ranking. This is in contrast to lower-quality sites that are not related to Nike’s products.
Another important backlink metric to track is referring domains.
The more high-quality links you have from relevant websites, the better your chances are of ranking high in search engines.
9. Page Speed & Core Web Vitals
The best user experience is achieved when pages load quickly (under three seconds) and provide content that satisfies the information need and gives the end-user what they want quickly.
A good page load time can lead to more conversions, according to many studies.
Another important SEO metric to measure is Core Web Vitals which focuses on user experience – loading, interactivity, and visual stability:
- Largest contentful paint (LCP).
- First input delay (FID).
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS).
CWV is one of the Page Experience metrics.
It is used to improve the overall UX of the web as a ranking signal. Pages that are ranked “Good” are already performing well in search.
10. Crawl Errors
A crawl error occurs when a search engine attempts to access a page on your website, but is unsuccessful in doing so with a 200-response code.
To ensure that Google can find, index, crawl and rank your content, it is important to monitor crawl errors.
Crawl errors can occur if a page is blocked et cetera.
If there is a significant increase in crawl errors, this may decrease your search engine visibility. You should ensure that you are regularly crawling your website and checking Google Search Console for any errors that may have occurred during the crawling process.
11. Top Exit Pages
The goal of your landing page is to convert the user’s visit into, for example, a sale or brochure download.
Sometimes, users cannot find what they are looking for. Another potential issue is that users may leave your site without converting after looking at other landing pages.
Exit pages are the pages where users leave your site. By looking at your top exit pages, you can see which pages are not performing well and where users are exiting.
If you review your analytics and see that 60% of users are leaving at a particular page, it’s time to revisit your page and investigate what is going on.
12. Organic Traffic
You should be tracking the amount of organic search traffic your site gets. This is an important metric for SEO that lets you know if your SEO strategies are working and if they are providing a solid foundation for a successful SEO campaign.
No SEO-based conversions or revenue can occur without organic traffic. If you’re not getting traffic, then there’s clearly something wrong that needs to be fixed.
You can track your organic traffic in Google Analytics. Monitor your organic traffic for both desktop and mobile. You should always compare your organic traffic numbers with your other SEO metrics to get an idea of how effective your traffic is.
13. New vs. Returning Visitors
Monitoring the number of new versus returning visitors is a valuable metric to measure.
If you have a lot of visitors who come back to your website but don’t buy anything, take a look at your exit pages to see what might be stopping them from making a purchase.
The goal of a good SEO strategy is to target a qualified audience and provide them with the information they need throughout their user journey, so they continue to come back to your site.
Home Depot produces videos and other content, like DIY content and videos, to help end users solve problems and figure out what might be wrong.
14. Competitor SEO Metrics
Competitor analysis is essential to understanding what content they are producing, what landing pages are effective, where they are gaining market share and ranking better than you, and where they are getting links from.
Keep an eye on your competitors’ backlinks to find new opportunities for your client’s website, and pay attention to their visibility to get an idea of how relevant they are. Identify the content gaps your competition has and create new strategies to outdo them.
15. Share Of Voice
Your “share of voice” is the percentage of people talking about your brand compared to your competitors. Monitoring your share of voice can help you see how your brand is doing compared to your top competitors in terms of occupying valuable search real estate.
This text provides information about which companies compete with yours for various keywords in different parts of the business and in different geographical areas.
You may not always be aware of who your competitors are.
16. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the term used to describe the percentage of people who visit only one page of a website before leaving.
A high bounce rate may not mean your website is ranked lower, but it could be indicative of a problem with certain pages or your website in general. It’s a missed opportunity to engage with your audience if you don’t do anything else.
So how can you reduce bounce rate? At the end of the day, you need to give visitors a great experience. There are a number of ways to do this:
- Ensure the page aligns with search intent.
- Make the purpose of the page immediately clear and put important details above the fold.
- Create legitimately great content that makes users want to explore your site more.
- Make the text easy to read and well-designed.
- Avoid things that disrupt the user experience (pop-ups, ads, unintuitive navigation, etc.)
- Improve page speed.
- Implement compelling CTAs
17. Organic Conversions
Organic traffic is an important SEO measure because it helps you know whether you’re getting the right traffic to your site. You may not be getting the right people to visit your site if your traffic numbers are high but your conversions are low. You are attracting people who are not interested in what you have to offer.
If your traffic keywords don’t map to your customer acquisition funnel, you need to look at the keywords driving traffic to your site and determine whether they actually map to your customer acquisition funnel.
If, for example, you were to sell organic coffee beans, and you had an in-depth blog post about celebrities such as Sofia Vergara who are obsessed with strong, black coffee, this would be an example of how you could use your celebrity knowledge to generate traffic to your website. This page gets a lot of organic search traffic, but people aren’t engaging with it or buying anything. The audience for this content is likely people who are interested in celebrity gossip, rather than people who are potential customers for the product.
To increase conversion rates, identify relevant keywords associated with different stages of the customer journey, and create content that addresses those keywords.
Related posts:
