Blog Post

5 Essential SEO Metrics

Amber Blevins • Jul 21, 2022

When you set a goal, tracking your progress is vital. This is true for just about anything in life. No doubt, you measure all sorts of things in your local business to ensure you’re on course, from sales, to labor, to budgets.

Likewise, when you’re using SEO as part of your business’s marketing plan, it’s imperative you keep close track of its performance. While SEO isn’t a strategy that works overnight, it is flexible and can be easily adjusted as needed. And you'll know when to make those adjustments based on the performance metrics.

Here are five metrics you should keep an eye on in any SEO campaign.

Organic Traffic

The mother of all SEO metrics is probably organic traffic. This is the traffic that comes to your site from an unpaid source; not traffic from paid ads. Organic traffic is really why you’re doing SEO in the first place, so monitoring it is a no-brainer. Tracking your site’s organic traffic will help you identify if the foundations of your SEO campaign are working.

You can check up on your organic traffic via your Google Analytics dashboard. If you’re working with a digital marketing partner like Locallogy, you should get regular progress reports.

Organic Conversions

Organic conversions go hand-in-hand with your site’s organic traffic. Organic conversions are the visitors on your site (from an organic source, like Google) who take some sort of action. This could be signing up for your mailing list, downloading a white paper, or better yet, setting up an appointment with you.

Measuring your organic conversions helps to ensure you’re targeting the right audience in your SEO efforts. If you’re a kitchen and bath remodeler, you naturally want website visitors who are interested in having their kitchens or bathrooms renovated. People who are shopping for new bath towels aren’t quite your ideal customer.

If your organic conversions are low, it could be a sign your SEO isn’t targeting the best audience.

Keyword Ranking

When business owners think of SEO, many assume it’s all about keywords. While SEO is much more than just using the right keywords, they are vital to the process.

Using effective keywords on your website and then measuring your site’s performance can give you early insight into the success of your SEO strategy. But remember, the strength of your keywords will vary and these shifts can have a direct effect on your site’s search engine ranking.

Keeping track of your keyword rankings will help you identify when a particular word or phrase has taken a nosedive and is no longer effectively driving traffic to your website.

Bounce Rate

Tracking your website’s bounce rate will give you key insight into your website’s performance. A “bounce” is a single page session on your site. In other words, a visitor lands on your site and never moves beyond that page, never clicks any links, and never takes any action on the page.

The idea, of course, is to keep potential customers on your site as long as possible, clicking around and learning more about your company until they eventually contact you. If your bounce rate is high and customers seem to be leaving your site without viewing any other pages, it could be a clue that your site is slow, it doesn’t have engaging content, or your page titles are misleading.

Page Speed

Customer experience is one of Google's primary focuses. Websites that don’t offer a great customer experience will, as a matter of course, be ranked lower in search engine results.

Page speed is something Google keeps a close eye on when it’s determining whether or not a site provides a customer-friendly experience. As Google’s bots crawl through websites, they’re measuring the time it takes pages to load, how quickly the first images appear, and whether or not webpages shift around while loading.

Regularly measuring your site’s page speed will tell you when there’s a problem. Fixing issues with slow-loading pages will help your site’s ranking improve and provide your site visitor with a better experience.

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