Critical SEO Metrics to Track

If you’re looking to improve your conversions quickly, PPC ads are the way to do it but it will cost you. On the other hand, you can also do SEO, which would cost a little less than PPC but make sure you look out for the following critical metrics:

Sales/Leads

The website should be designed to benefit your business, whether the site is the digital face of the company or is practically the entirety of the company. Keeping track of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) processes is something that can’t be ignored.

Organic Traffic

A key objective of SEO campaigns is to improve website traffic from organic searches. Organic searches that lead to traffic are free site visitations for the business, so they are highly sought after. Using Google Analytic’s “Sessions” sub-section under “Organic Search,” which tracks your traffic over various time frames. To use this successfully, you will want to analyze different time periods. Two ways to take a look at this traffic is through weekly data and yearly data.

Weekly data can be used to reflect traffic changes over a short time-frame and is good for looking at the effects of a heavy stream of new content. Whereas yearly data is a great indicator for tracking the long-term effects of SEO-related changes that you make to the site.

Keywords

Keywords and keyword rankings are yet another important SEO metric to work into your SEO campaign. Using keywords that rank well in terms of what your content is about will certainly ramp up your website traffic. There are many services that will assist you in performing keyword research, and also help you keep track of changes in your website’s rankings as time passes on.

Backlinks

Backlinks are webpage links from a webpage to any other site and can act as a digital “seal of approval” from one site to another site showing support for it. You’ll want to keep track of the number of backlinks of your site and of your SEO ranking competitors. It’s also important to check the quality and relevancy of the pages that are linking back to you, as Google may punish you for having backlinks to sites that seem suspicious or spammy in nature.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the portion of people who only visited the main page/entrance page, and then left the site without any further interaction. This is an important measure of user engagement for your website. You’ll want the bounce rate to be very low, as this will strongly indicate that users are having a good and/or engaging time on your site. High bounce rates on important pages for your site, like your homepage or contact page, could mean that you have larger issues with page loading speeds, overall user experience, or navigational errors.

Pages Per Session

Like the bounce rate, pages per session is an important tracker of user engagement on your site. It measures the portion of people who visit more than one page on site once they’ve visited an initial page. This metric is relevant for analyzing the effectiveness of your site’s navigation. A low amount of Pages Per Session reveals that users aren’t finding your site’s content engaging enough to visit other pages, or that navigation is failing, leading to frustrated users leaving the site prematurely.

Of course, if you don’t the time and patience to wait for your SEO campaign to gain traction you can always go with PPC for instant traffic on your website. You’ll have to manage adwords and completely have to track different metrics. Both SEO and PPC are surefire ways to have traffic on your website –it’s up to you which method you’re going to use.