Like any other digital marketing technique, the main goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve your bottom line. Whether it’s attracting potential customers to your eCommerce site or getting more traffic to your landing page, SEO specialists employ best practices to ensure your website is in the best position to attract potential customers and generate more revenue.
If properly executed, SEO can attract incremental traffic to your website and generate conversions. However, since you’re competing with thousands of competitors vying for attention from the same audience, you need to remain consistent with your approach.
So, how do you know if your approach is generating the right results? How do you monitor SEO performance to see if you’re on the right track?
We created this guide to help you with your SEO monitoring efforts. Below, we share tips on tracking analytics SEO and what tools to use to monitor SEO results and gauge your success.
The following talking points will guide this discussion:
• Why It’s Crucial To Measure SEO Performance To Quantify Success
• What Are SEO Metrics?
• What SEO Metrics Can You Use To Measure SEO Results?
• Best Metrics SEO Tracking Tools To Measure SEO Success
Why It’s Crucial To Measure SEO Performance and Quantify Success
Athletes measure nearly every aspect of their performance to monitor how well or how fast they’re improving. SEO is no different.
While the metrics being measured are not the same, professional SEOs track every facet of an SEO campaign to measure the impact of their SEO tactics. Let’s look at the three main reasons athletes do so and how it relates to SEO:
1. Tracking Progress: By monitoring various performance metrics, athletes can understand whether their training is working and whether they are inching closer to their goals.
2. Finding Strengths and Weaknesses: Analyzing critical aspects of an athlete’s performance helps them determine where they shine and what needs more work. This allows them to tailor their training programs to address these strengths and weaknesses.
3. Setting and Monitoring Benchmarks: Quantifying their performance enables athletes to set a baseline for their performance and see how they can improve over time. This can also help them set realistic goals and measure their progress over time.
“To see how well your SEO is working, we keep an eye on metrics like organic traffic, the mix of branded vs. non-branded traffic, clickthrough rates, bounce rates, pages per session, average session duration, organic conversion rates, keyword rankings, backlinks and site speed. All of these metrics tell you a lot about what’s working and where you can improve,” said Nanette Taripe, Demand Generation Technical SEO Specialist.
By tracking SEO results, you can:
Replicate Success
You can identify the key drivers of success by accurately measuring and understanding which aspects of your SEO strategy are working well. This knowledge is like a blueprint for success, enabling you to replicate these winning strategies in future endeavors or even across different segments of your digital marketing to boost your online visibility.
Improve Decision Making
Quantifying SEO success through SEO monitoring gives you a data-driven basis for making decisions. Instead of relying on intuition or general best practices, you can use concrete data to guide your actions. This leads to more informed decisions that will improve your website and business outcomes.
Refine Your Efforts
Being able to measure your SEO activities by keeping track of analytics for SEO shines a light on both your triumphs and areas that need work. This dual insight is crucial for honing your SEO strategies. It enables you to redirect your resources and focus toward tactics with a higher probability of success, maximizing the efficiency of your efforts.
Align Your Strategy With Your Goals
SEO measurement helps align your SEO tactics with your broader business goals. Understanding the relationship between analytics SEO and key performance indicators (KPIs) like sales, leads and engagement allows you to customize your approach to more directly support your overall objectives.
Accurately Calculate ROI
One of the most compelling reasons to measure SEO success is to determine your SEO activities’ return on investment (ROI). By quantifying the benefits of your SEO efforts in terms of metrics SEO is measured by, like increased traffic, improved rankings and conversions, you can calculate the true financial impact of your strategy. This justifies the investment in SEO and helps in planning future marketing budgets with a clearer understanding of what SEO can deliver.
What Are SEO Metrics?
Success can be measured in many ways, such as increases in site traffic, conversion rates, visibility and, ultimately, the bottom line. However, a more actionable approach to tracking SEO success is to set specific goals for your website or campaign. To determine whether you’ve met these goals, it’s crucial to monitor various analytics by which SEO is tracked.
SEO metrics are essential data points that help evaluate the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts. They provide insights into how well a site performs in search results, assess the impact of different SEO strategies and identify areas that need improvement.
“SEO success isn’t [measured by] a single metric, but rather [about how you’re] achieving your business goals. Instead of looking at each metric as a stand-alone indicator of success, we look at how each facet of your SEO strategy feeds into your overarching business goals,” said Taripe.
By consistently monitoring these analytics for SEO, you can adjust your strategies as needed, ensuring your SEO efforts are as effective as possible and directly contributing to achieving your objectives.
What SEO Metrics Can You Use To Measure SEO Results?
To measure SEO results, there are countless analytics for SEO you can monitor and add to your search engine optimization report. But which ones should you track? The answer depends on your goals.
Here are eight of the most important metrics you can use for SEO monitoring:
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the lifeblood of SEO. This SEO metric represents the number of visitors that visit your site through search engines without clicking on paid ads. The amount of organic traffic you’re getting is a solid measure of how visible your site is and how well it resonates with your intended audience.
Why is this important? Monitoring your organic traffic gives you a clear picture of how well your SEO efforts are working. Beyond that, it’s crucial to determine whether you’re attracting the right kind of visitors.
“While traffic is a strong indicator, true SEO success hinges on attracting the right kind of traffic that converts and aligns with your business goals. A well-rounded strategy ensures visitors find your site valuable and take desired actions, not just increasing traffic numbers,” Taripe said.
To that end, it’s also beneficial to classify organic traffic and create a distinction between new and returning visitors. This can provide nuanced insights into how different segments interact with your site and how effective your content and SEO strategies are in attracting and retaining users.
New Visitors
Having a high number of new visitors is a strong signal of how effectively your SEO tactics are helping you tap into new market segments or demographics. They are characterized by the following behaviors:
• Click patterns tend to be more exploratory
• Lower conversion potential and need more time to develop
• Often have higher bounce rates
Returning Visitors
Returning visitors reflect a sustained interest in your content, products or services. Having a healthy ratio of returning visitors strongly indicates content relevancy, suggesting that your site offers enough value to encourage repeat visits. Interactions are:
• More targeted and purposeful, possibly focusing on specific actions that lead to conversions
• Typically have lower bounce rates
• More likely to convert due to previous history with your brand
2. Keyword Rankings
Even in today’s SEO landscape, where search results are highly personalized based on factors like location and browsing history, monitoring search engine keyword ranking provides a valuable benchmark for SEO measurement and success tracking.
Tracking these rankings allows you to see how well your pages are performing in the eyes of search engines for specific queries. An improvement in keyword rankings usually correlates with increased visibility in search engines, which can lead to more organic traffic and, subsequently, higher conversion potential.
Monitoring search engine ranking helps you understand the effectiveness of your SEO tactics. If you notice that despite increased efforts, your rankings for crucial keywords aren’t improving – or are even declining – this could signal that your current approach needs tweaking.
Perhaps it’s time to shift focus to less competitive keywords or to refine your content so it’s even more in line with what your audience is looking for and helps you achieve better outcomes.
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The CTR is a fundamental SEO measurement criterion that measures the ratio of users who click on your link on the search engine results page (SERP). It is calculated using the formula:
A high organic CTR means more search traffic for your website. It directly correlates (to a certain extent) with keyword rankings since the higher your domain ranks, the more clicks you get.
According to the search engine optimization report by Backlinko, the top result on SERPs gets an average CTR of 27.6%. Meanwhile, the second and third positions garner average CTRs of 15.8 and 11.0%, respectively.
However, you don’t need to rank in the top three SERP positions to see amazing SEO results. Anything above industry benchmarks is considered a good number. To help you achieve that, here are some tips to improve your CTR:
• Use power words like “best,” “free” or “step-by-step” to trigger emotional responses from target audiences.
• Include numbers or brackets to help your pages stand out.
• Keep your title tags under 55 characters so they’re not being truncated on SERPs.
• Incorporate action-oriented phrases like “find out” or “learn more” in meta-descriptions.
• Meta descriptions must not exceed 105 characters.
4. Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is a crucial metric for evaluating the quality of visitor interactions on your website. It measures the percentage of sessions that qualify as engaged based on specific criteria.
To qualify as an engaged session, it must meet any of the following parameters
• A session that lasts for at least 10 seconds
• A session that triggers at least one conversion event
• A session where the visitor views two or more pages
Measuring the engagement rate is essential for understanding the effectiveness of your content and overall site design in encouraging deeper interaction with your site. Higher engagement rates indicate that your website provides valuable information or services that compel users to explore more extensively, interact with your offerings and possibly convert.
5. Bounce Rate
On the other side of the coin, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. This SEO metric is nuanced, as a bounce can indicate different things:
• The visitor may have found your site’s content or layout unappealing or confusing.
• The visitor may have also found exactly what they needed in less time and left satisfied.
This shows that a high bounce rate isn’t inherently negative without context. Given its variability, analyzing bounce rate effectively requires looking at it at the page level rather than as a site-wide average.
It also helps to support this metric by measuring scroll depth, which measures how much of a page the visitor has seen. This approach helps discern whether specific pages successfully fulfill user needs or if they might be driving visitors away due to poor design or irrelevant content.
“Engagement metrics like bounce rate and session duration are vital to SEO success because they show how well your content connects with visitors,” said Thrive SEO Specialist, Don Gruspe.
“A high engagement rate means search engines see your content as valuable and relevant for your audience, which [in turn] helps improve your rankings and attract more organic traffic.”
6. Website Authority
Website authority is another SEO metric that predicts the potential of a website to rank well in search engines by analyzing various factors. Different tools have varying names and unique algorithms to measure these scores, such as:
• Website Authority Score by SEMrush: This metric combines data on backlink metrics, organic search data, website traffic data and other factors to assess a domain or webpage’s overall quality and SEO performance potential.
• Domain Authority (DA) by Moz: DA predicts a website’s likelihood of ranking in SERPs by analyzing linking root domains and the total number of links.
• Domain Rating (DR) by Ahrefs: DR focuses on a website’s backlink profile. It looks at the quantity and quality of external backlinks and considers the DR scores of the linking domains to assess the website’s strength relative to others in their database.
A higher authority score usually indicates a more robust, more reputable website in the eyes of search engines. However, it is also important to note that a site’s authority score is not a ranking factor and, therefore, doesn’t have any bearing on the SERPs.
Despite not being a direct ranking factor, measuring authority is still valuable for three main reasons:
• It is helpful for benchmarking and comparing the relative strength of your domain versus your competitors.
• It helps gauge the effectiveness of your link-building efforts and other elements of your strategy over time.
• By analyzing the factors contributing to the score, you can identify areas of your own SEO that may need improvement, such as earning more high-quality backlinks or removing harmful links.
7. Goal Completions
Goal completions refer to the number of times visitors complete specific actions on a website that have been predefined as “goals” in Google Analytics. These goals can be virtually any measurable action, such as:
• Form submissions
• Time spent on a page
• Making a purchase
• Clicking on a link
• Watching a video
When completed by a user, each of these actions counts as one goal completion. The main focus here is on counting each individual occurrence of the predefined actions.
To fully leverage this metric’s potential, it’s essential to think carefully about your website’s overall purpose. What is the primary action or set of actions you want visitors to take?
Once these actions are defined as goals in Google Analytics, you can start tracking their completion on a monthly basis. This ongoing monitoring allows you to see how many goals are being completed and how these completions are trending over time.
8. Conversion Rate
Finally, the conversion rate is a metric that measures your website’s effectiveness in turning visits into goal completions. It is calculated using the following formula:
The conversion rate is arguably the most direct indicator of SEO success, showing how traffic translates into actionable results. It answers the question: “What percentage of visitors are completing the actions we want them to perform?”.
5 Best Metrics SEO Tracking Tools To Measure SEO Success
Tracking and measuring SEO success is essential for any digital strategy. By leveraging the right tools, you can gain insights into your website’s performance, understand user behavior and refine your tactics to achieve better results.
Depending on your primary goal, the right SEO tracking tool can provide the data and features you need to optimize your campaign and reach your goals. Below, we explore some of the best tools available, highlighting their key features and ideal use cases.
1. Google Search Console
Best For: Site Debugging
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google that offers vital insights into how your website is performing in Google’s search results. This powerful diagnostic and reporting tool is your go-to for optimizing your website’s content. Thanks to accurate, Google-sourced data, it’s an essential asset for fine-tuning your SEO tactics.
Ideal for both beginners and seasoned web admins, GSC helps you monitor clicks, impressions, clickthrough rates (CTR) and the average position of your site’s URLs. By analyzing how your pages perform directly in search results, you can identify what’s hitting the mark and areas needing a boost, ensuring your site stays competitive and up to speed in the dynamic world of search.
Key Features:
• Search Performance Reports: Offer detailed data on how your website is performing in Google Search, including metrics like impressions and clicks, for better visibility and optimization decisions.
• Index Coverage: Provides tools to detect and resolve issues affecting Google’s ability to crawl and index your site, ensuring maximum visibility in search results.
• URL Inspection: Enables detailed checks on the indexing status of specific pages, helping to diagnose and rectify issues that could impact search performance.
2. Google Analytics 4
Best For: Free Site Analytics
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest iteration of Google’s comprehensive web analytics tool, providing detailed insights into website traffic and user behavior. As a powerful upgrade to its predecessors, GA4 offers a host of advanced features that enhance the ability to track user interactions across various platforms seamlessly.
Unlike Google Search Console, which primarily focuses on search performance, GA4 provides a holistic view of your digital presence. However, it does come with a steeper learning curve than GSC. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable tool that provides a complete understanding of your website’s performance and audience.
Key Features:
• Advanced Tracking: GA4 captures a comprehensive range of user interactions, from page views and events to conversions and eCommerce transactions, enabling a deeper understanding of user behavior.
• Audience Analysis: Features sophisticated audience segmentation tools that allow for a detailed understanding of visitor demographics, interests and behaviors, enabling more targeted content and marketing strategies.
• Cross-Platform Tracking: This offers integrated data analysis across websites, mobile apps and other digital platforms, providing a cohesive view of user interactions regardless of where they occur.
3. Ahrefs
Best For: Competitor Research
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that offers extensive capabilities to analyze and enhance your website’s visibility in search engines. Known for its robust backlink analysis feature, Ahrefs provides deep insights into your site’s backlink profile, helping you understand the strength and quality of your external links. It excels in competitive analysis, allowing you to peek into your competitors’ SEO strategies, from the keywords they rank for to their content marketing tactics.
Key Features:
• Site Explorer: Delivers a comprehensive view of a website’s backlink profile, including the sources of backlinks, the types of links (like dofollow or nofollow) and how these links are distributed across anchor texts.
• Keyword Research: Enables the discovery and evaluation of new keywords, providing detailed metrics such as difficulty scores and search volume, helping you prioritize your keyword strategy effectively.
• Content Analysis: Offers insights into how content is performing in terms of traffic, social shares and the backlinks it attracts, aiding in optimizing content strategy.
• Competitive Analysis: This allows for an in-depth look at competitors’ SEO activities, highlighting strengths and weaknesses in their strategies and giving you data to inform your SEO efforts.
4. SEMrush
Best For: Rank Tracking
SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO and digital marketing toolkit that offers extensive capabilities to improve your website’s visibility and marketing efforts. This platform is renowned for its comprehensive features that help you understand your site’s performance and that of your competitors. These can provide insights into the most effective keywords, backlink strategies and content marketing tactics that improve your website’s SEO performance.
Key Features:
• Keyword Research: This service delivers extensive data on search volume, keyword difficulty and related keywords to help pinpoint profitable SEO opportunities.
• Competitive Analysis: This site offers tools to examine competitors’ websites, revealing their strategies in keywords, backlinks and advertising. You can leverage this information to inform and adapt your own strategies.
• Site Audit: Identifies and diagnoses technical SEO issues like broken links, crawl errors and duplicate content, complete with actionable recommendations for resolution.
• Rank Tracking: Enables consistent monitoring of your SEO progress by tracking keyword rankings across different search engines and regions.
5. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Best For: SEO Audits
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile desktop tool that is a comprehensive crawler for both small and large websites. It allows you to quickly analyze, audit and review a site from an SEO perspective to identify SEO-related issues such as broken links, duplicate content, poor metadata and oversized files or images that could slow down your site.
With its ability to crawl both small and vast websites efficiently, Screaming Frog is essential for performing detailed SEO audits and ensuring your website adheres to SEO best practices. Its capability to export key onsite SEO elements into Excel format also allows for easy analysis and reporting to help you achieve better search engine rankings.
Key Features:
• Website Crawling: Efficiently aggregates data on critical SEO elements such as URLs, page titles, meta descriptions and headers, ensuring comprehensive site analysis.
• Broken Link Detection: This feature pinpoints broken links and redirects, facilitating corrections that enhance user experience and SEO performance.
• Duplicate Content Analysis: Evaluates your website’s content to detect and address duplicate content issues, thereby improving your search engine ranking potential.
Unlock the Power of SEO With Seasoned Experts
Understanding what metrics to keep track of and what tools to use can make navigating the complexities of SEO significantly easier. However, to truly unlock the power of SEO, you need the help of seasoned experts to take your marketing efforts to the next level.
With two decades of experience in the digital marketing industry, Thrive applies a strategic approach, utilizing proven strategies and advanced techniques to boost your website’s visibility and traffic effectively.
Whether it’s refining your site’s structure, enhancing on-page content or constructing a solid backlink profile, Thrive is equipped to address all your SEO challenges and transform your SEO hurdles into opportunities for growth.
Contact us today for a complimentary SEO analysis and take the first step towards dominating search engine rankings.
