So, you’ve worked tirelessly to develop an SEO strategy for your website.
You did everything by the books: You put alt tags on all the images, started backlinking from one or two high quality sites, and re-wrote all the on-page content to optimize it for your niche. Maybe you’ve even gone through and tweaked the URL structure of all your pages, just to get better on page optimization.
Now what? You just sit with your fingers crossed on one hand and a cold drink in the other, hoping that the Google powers-that-be reward your efforts? You could. Or you could back your investment in SEO results with diligent assessment.
I know what you’re probably thinking. Do I have to check and monitor all the content, all the time? Thankfully, the answer is No.
All you really need are a few key metrics that, if monitored consistently, will help keep your site strong in the targeted niche.
The great thing about SEO is that if something is not working out quite right, you have the power to change it right away. For example, maybe you chose some generic keywords that are not driving much traffic directly to your site. Don’t be scared to try a group of long-tail keywords – the kind of question phrases that people type into Google all the time. Working with long-tail keywords is more affordable and drives high-quality hits to you site.
In this article, we hand you the metrical tools necessary to visualize your successes and shortcomings. Use these measurements to adapt, iterate, and keep on that upward trajectory.
Measure SEO Performance Month-by-Month
First, let’s tackle how to systematize measurement. Now that you have some of the basics of SEO down, it’s important to develop a measurement routine to gauge the performance of key metrics for SEO. Not all metrics – only the most important ones.
The first thing to know about measuring performance is that it should not be done every single day. Nor should it be done once a year. There’s a sweet spot in between.
Ideally, measuring SEO performance should be a monthly endeavor. Presuming that you are working with Google Analytics (the free measurement software offered by Google), a great place to start is just to monitor organic traffic rates over the first few weeks and see which sites do best, and why.
Specific SEO Metric Measurement Tactics
Ready for the nitty-gritty? We thought so!
In this section, check out a few strategies and SEO tools to help you measure and tweak your SEO work so that your site can remain top-of-the-heap over the long-term.
Break open an Excel sheet and get ready to take down some numbers. All the finest SEO consultants know that SEO campaign success metrics always include these 3 important factors:
1. Search Engine Traffic
Give a monthly check in Google Analytics to the sources of your traffic.
There are three kind of sources: direct navigation (which is any traffic from non-linked sources); referral traffic (gained from links to other sites); and search traffic (searches types into a search engine like Google or Bing).
Track the monthly changes to each of these metrics and focus efforts on the most important source for your niche. Referral traffic and direct navigation might take some time to build-up, while search traffic should always represent the highest volume.
2. Always Monitor Keywords
Keywords are a great source of free traffic. They are essentially a free tool you can use to connect your site with interested consumers. A proper strategy would be to make a small list of primary keywords and phrases that fit right into your niche. Combine them with a longer list of more general keywords, and place them strategically on each page of your site.
The hard part is monitoring the keyword changes in search volumes and deciding when to replace one of your chosen keywords or phrases. Rapid fluctuation is bound to happen no matter what, so a smart bet would be to monitor over 2-3 months to get a more accurate idea if a keyword is going to pull traffic or not.
3. Conversion Rates Matter Most
Simply put, conversion rates are the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website – like making a purchase or filling out a form – relative to the total number of visitors.
Conversation rates affect the bottom line of your business more than any other metric. They should rise in accordance with better search engine traffic and more precise keyword selection, but it’s far from a guarantee.One of the best ways to understand conversion rates is to see what page on your site has the highest conversion rate. You can then devote some time to optimizing that one page even more, safe in the understanding that it will probably drive landing page conversion rates even higher.
The Other SEO Metrics: User Engagement, Speed, and Bounce Rates
If you’ve read this far, then you’re down the rabbit hole with us. While the metrics above represent the core of your SEO measurements, they aren’t the extent of your toolkit. There are several other indicators of SEO health that you can – and should – keep an eye on.
1. Speed
Chief among these other metrics is speed. In the era of Google’s Core Web Vitals and Core Updates, page load times are incredibly impactful.
In an effort to serve users the best possible website experiences, Google started highlighting sites with fast speeds – and demoting those sites that fall short of speed requirements. (According to Screaming Frog, “Only 12% of Mobile and 13% of Desktop results passed the CWV assessment”). The bottom-line takeaway: assess your website’s speed, and optimize to get things clipping at a faster pace.
In our resource on SEO plugins, we cover a few speed-optimizing plug-ins to consider. Take a look!
2. User Engagement
Another handy metric to consider is engagement, which can be further broken down into topics like dwell time, session duration, and pages per session.
This doesn’t just track how many eyeballs hit your site – it offers a story into how they use their time, how deeply they’re invested in the content, and how “sticky” your site is. You can find your answers (once again) over at Google Analytics.
3. Bounce Rate
Lastly, there’s the dark side of engagement, the yin to engagement’s yang: bounce rates.
Bounce rates refer to the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page, without interacting further. A high bounce rate can indicate that the landing page is not engaging or relevant to the visitor’s interests. Monitoring bounce rates helps assess the effectiveness of content and user experience on your site.
Measuring Metrics Takes Patience and Strategy
These are three of the most important SEO metrics to measure on a monthly basis. Don’t get discouraged if things have not turned around in three months. If you are optimizing your pages and diligently monitoring the performance metrics, it’s only a matter of time before search volume will increase and conversion rates will improve. Care for some more detailed advice about measuring SEO metrics? Paul Teitelman is a local Toronto SEO expert who will leverage his years of experience to your advantage.
