Succeeding online without implementing Search Engine Optimization strategies is impossible. SEO is the most vital element that can either make or break your website and impact the overall performance of your business. In fact, you can gauge its importance by the fact that sometimes SEO is the sole determining factor when it comes to revenue generation for a business.
However, even though you have implemented your SEO strategy, how do you determine it works in your favor? Unlike a few other marketing strategies, it is easy to track the key metrics that matter for your business with the help of an SEO tool. But what are the metrics that truly matter, and what are the ones that don’t? Read the article to know more.
Key SEO Metrics That Matter:
- Organic Traffic:
One of the fundamental SEO strategies is optimizing your website for certain keywords. Now, how do we determine whether keyword optimization is producing fruitful results? It is by analyzing the organic traffic of your website. Organic traffic is the amount of unpaid incoming website traffic. This means that a user searches for the keyword your website was optimized for, your website appears on the search results, and they click on it based on the information they could gather from the title tag and meta descriptions.
- Conversion Rate:
Conversion rate is directly related to the amount of revenue your business generates and is an important metric that determines the success of your SEO strategy. Driving organic traffic to your website is great but useless if it doesn’t convert into customers. So, if your conversion rate is constantly dropping while organic traffic is on the rise, there is something wrong with your SEO strategy that needs improvement.
- Organic Visibility:
Your website’s organic visibility tells how well your website performs in the organic search results. It is an essential part of SEO because it determines your click-through rate, targeted leads, brand awareness, conversion rate, and more. To improve the organic visibility of your website, you must focus on the technical SEO, local SEO, on-page SEO, and overall search intent of your target audience.
- Core Web Vitals:
Google pays a lot of attention to the overall user experience of your website. This is where the performance of your core web vitals comes into play. Your core web vitals include page load time, interactivity, and visual stability. Ensuring that the core web vitals of your website are performing at their optimal best is crucial to enhancing your search engine ranking and having a competitive edge compared to your competitors.
- Domain Authority:
Your website’s domain authority depends on how many authoritative and credible backlinks you have earned for your web pages. MOZ developed this metric, which means that websites are scored from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better the domain authority. Ideally, a DA above 85 is considered a good score, and as a website owner, you must aim for the same if you want your website to rank higher on SERP.
SEO Metrics That Don’t Matter:
- Bounce Rate:
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who click on your website and exit it without taking any action, like clicking on another page, signing up for a new letter, or leaving a comment. Even though many experts have given a lot of attention to the bounce rate, it is less valuable than one thinks. This is because it is distorted by Google Analytics, as there is no benchmark for the bounce rate percentage, which is bad for your website. Moreover, the bounce rate of a website largely depends on the type of page, user intent, and niche.
- Exit Rate:
Exit rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the site from a particular page. Even though some developers may say that a higher exit rate is bad for a web page, it can also mean the exact opposite. A higher exit rate can also mean that the user got what they were searching for on the particular page and, hence, exited it.
- Pages Per Session:
This metric shows the average time a user spends on a page. Like bounce and exit rates, it doesn’t help you understand why a user didn’t spend much time on the page and exited quicker than expected.
Conclusion:
Unlike many other marketing strategies, the success of search engine optimization for your website can be measured through some key metrics. However, one needs to understand that not all metrics are as useful as they are perceived. Hence, if you want to gauge if you are taking your SEO strategy in the right direction, you need to pay attention to the metrics that actually matter for your business. Moreover, the metrics mentioned above that don’t matter to your business should also be taken into account if you want a foolproof plan for success.
