Track 7 SEO Metrics, Ignore The Rest
What’s the difference between sites at the top of Google and everyone else desperate for traffic? Those who track SEO metrics separate themselves from the pack.
Up to this point, we’ve taught you everything you need to drive an insane amount of traffic to your site. But there’s one last step: measuring our SEO performance.
In this lesson, we’ve filtered through every SEO metric imaginable and narrowed it down to seven focus points. Not only that, you’ll also get two tools to measure what’s important. Discover the connection between website traffic and revenue generation with this guide on Transforming Site Traffic into Profit.
This will help you track what content is producing traffic, so you can then improve it for better results.
What Are SEO Metrics?
Since search results often take time to produce results, tracking metrics is a way to ensure you’re on the right path toward gaining traffic before the big pay off of fresh leads and sales arrive.
Like we defined what is SEO, we need to define what’s a metric.
Defining A SEO Metric
You may ask, “What’s a SEO metric?” A metric is a standard of measurement that’s crystal clear.
When talking SEO metrics, these are knowing exactly how many people visited your site in the past month, where did they specifically come from, and what pages did they visit, etc.
It’s concrete data you can use to improve upon going forward. Because without metrics, you may find yourself trying to fix something that’s already working and then screw it up. Or you may miss a giant opportunity because you’re unaware of it.
As an SEO agency, we use data to relay performance to customers, get organized internally, and be inspired to reach new goals.
Are you ready? It’s time to reveal these seven SEO metrics.
SEO Performance Metrics That Matter
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is first on the list because it’s the truest evaluator of your website’s SEO success.
This is the total traffic sent directly to your site from organic searches on Google and other search engines.
The reason you spend all this time learning SEO and trying to rank keywords on the first page of Google is to see this organic traffic number go to the moon!
Now overall traffic is important too. But this figure can be quickly manipulated with expensive advertising campaigns or a lucky viral post. So your SEO efforts will be reflected best in your organic traffic numbers.
To view organic traffic, simply sign into Google Analytics, and click:
- Acquisition
- Overview
- Organic Search
This dashboard shows organic traffic. If interested, you can select a different date to see organic performance.
We recommend you view organic traffic monthly to ensure you’re making progress.
2. Keyword Rankings
Here’s an obvious one. If the process is to research keywords to rank for and then write content on these keywords, wouldn’t it also make sense to track your Google keyword rankings?
I pay to use Ahrefs Rank Tracker for this. But if you’re on a tight budget, manually track the keyword rankings in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets.
Tracking this SEO metric shows you where you’re dominating in top 10 results. More importantly, it tells you what pages to add content and acquire links because you’re extremely close in the 10-20 range.
Plus, it’s a freaking blast to search for a keyword phrase and see your page ranks 1st across the entire internet. That’s a special feeling.
3. Backlinks
Thank God for tools like Ahrefs Backlink Checker or it’d be impossible to track every link to your domain. This tool gives you the total of both backlinks and referring domains.
The difference is you can have three backlinks from the same site but that would only be one referring domain.
Tracking backlinks and seeing your totals grow should motivate you to write unbelievable content and reach out to ask for links when it adds value.
Remember, it’s about high-value links more than getting as many links as possible. Getting a link from a .edu site with a 90 domain authority will go way farther than 15 links from spammy sites.
4. Domain Authority
Google takes into consideration each page’s domain authority (DA) when ranking websites. By receiving more backlinks and referring domains, DA improves. This is scored on a 0 to 100 scale.
Curious about your website’s authority? Use this tool, or Ahrefs, to check your domain authority every month or quarter.
If you’re doing SEO strategy correctly, your domain authority will have a consistent upward trajectory over time.
5. Traffic Source
Knowing where your traffic is coming from is helpful because you get two major opportunities here.
You can double down on what’s working. Or you can keep the strong traffic sources going consistently and spend more time on weaker sources.
To find your traffic sources, in Google Analytics, navigate to:
- Acquisition
- Overview
Again, you can’t improve what you don’t know. Knowing the source of each traffic stream is extremely useful when acted upon.
6. Top Pages
This goes hand in hand with knowing the traffic source. When you know where people are coming from and the pages they’re landing on most, you can spend extra time improving the content to make it truly your best work.
Add additional images or videos to better compliment the page. Or, see how you can increase email sign ups or sales with a well placed call-to-action button.
By adding content to the page and improving its quality, more visitors will see value in your site and click around to other pages, or share it with their social network.
Plus, you can analyze why this page is getting the most traffic and duplicate its fundamentals to other pages.
7. Conversions
This metric is more complex than the rest. In the beginning it’s not the most important SEO metric. But over time, as your focus switches from generating traffic to monetizing, true conversions become the #1 metric.
Be careful to know the definition of a conversion. Many people count a conversion as someone opting-in to your newsletter, attending a webinar, downloading a free report, calling you, or submitting a contact form.
But are these truly conversions? No, because the customer hasn’t spent a dollar with you yet. These are leads, not sales.
A true conversion is when you get on a call or have a meeting, and they pay the invoice.
Conversion means a buyer exchanged money. That’s the name of the game in business.
SEO Tracking Tools
Wondering how you’re ever going to track these seven metrics? Don’t worry. Use the two tools below and you’ll have it all covered.
1. Google Analytics
What better source to get data than straight from the horse’s mouth?
Google offers an awesome tool called Google Analytics. It’s totally free and available to anyone that adds the tracking code to their website.
Instantly you’ll start to see more metrics than you know what to do with, and that’s ok. You have this guide to reference.
From the list of seven above, I use Google Analytics to track:
- Organic traffic
- Traffic source
If you were only allowed one SEO performance tool on the planet, Google Analytics is your best option. Fortunately, we can combine this helpful tool with another one.
2. Ahrefs
Pop quiz: What are the two main factors to climbing the Google rankings? Content and backlinks. Ahrefs is my favorite tool for analyzing backlinks.
Once you sign up, you’ll get immediate access to your domain rating and number of backlinks. Even better, enter your keywords to track your rankings and the number of backlinks it approximately takes to surpass your competitors.
Used strategically, this information is gold for driving traffic and bringing in revenue.
We use Ahrefs to track:
- Keyword rankings
- Domain authority
- Backlinks
- Top landing pages
Sure there’s a variety of additional SEO tracking tools out there. But there’s more power in simplicity. Stick to these two tools before you risk spending more time tracking results than you do driving traffic.
Metrics To Ignore
Like in life, some things really matter more than others. The same applies to SEO.
While these metrics can serve a purpose, you’re better off ignoring the following list until you’re at a point where you feel maxed out. Then you can look to squeeze a tiny bit more out of your search traffic.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a pretty pointless metric that website owners get tormented by for no reason.
A bounce is when someone views one page on your site and then clicks off your site. At first, this seems like they hated your content. But that can be very misleading.
For blogs, maybe you answered their question so thoroughly that they have no other questions about the topic. They know exactly what to do next, so they leave your site after viewing one page.
See the problem?
The bounce would say that’s a failure. But in reality, it’s mission complete and you gained a loyal fan of your brand because you answered their question perfectly. Next week, they come back to your site, subscribe to your newsletter, and schedule a sales call.
Your bounce rate doesn’t tell the full story when it comes to the value of your site to others. So don’t let it bother you.
And if you want to improve it, try ending your posts by instructing the reader to click a link to go to a related post about the topic. This alone will cut down on a ton of bounces.
Time On Site
Time on site tracks how much time visitors spend on your site. I’m not a big fan of this one either.
Remember the main goal of SEO is to make money. We do that by driving traffic. We generate traffic by ranking high on Google.
Meaning the point of SEO isn’t for vanity metrics like on site time. And that certainly doesn’t pay the bills.
Let’s go into another scenario. Say someone visits your store for 10 seconds, sees everything they desire, and makes a purchase. Your time on site is bad at 10 seconds, but your profits trump that by a mile.
There’s no recommended on site time and it will also vary depending on the site you have: ecommerce, content, landing page, etc. Do yourself a favor and ignore this one.
Weekly Changes
If you’re anything like me, you want progress and you want it now. But Google doesn’t operate that way.
Publishing content and gaining backlinks will take weeks if not months to improve your search results. That’s just the way it is.
Put in the work. Be patient. And check your traffic stats monthly rather than weekly. Daily is foolish.
However, if you’ve seen a drastic decrease over the last few months and it’s a pattern, that’s problematic enough to worth looking into. See if Google can’t read your site or penalized you by running an Index Coverage Status report.
Social Traffic
Social traffic is the traffic coming to your site from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Google Analytics will show you this figure in their Acquisition Overview.
While I’m all for free traffic, I don’t value this in a SEO report nor spend time tracking it. Why? Because it’s highly volatile and random.
You’ll see wildly different traffic numbers month by month based on a variety of random factors like social algorithms, third party’s engagement with your post (retweets, comments, and upvotes), time of posting, etc.
This traffic reflects more about how many social media followers you have than your SEO performance. It’s not a solid indicator of ranking higher on Google.
Remember, if everything is progressing well for you and you have the extra time or cash to pay for a SEO strategist, feel free to dive into additional data. But for the majority, focusing on the seven metrics we defined above is all you need to get to millions of views. I promise you.
Conclusion
When you track SEO metrics like we outlined above, you should feel like a seasoned traffic professional, because you are.
Rookies hope and pray for Google results. Veterans use data to will their way to first rage rankings.
And if you’re not already tracking data like organic traffic and backlinks, there’s no better time to start than today.
What’s the most important SEO metric in your opinion?