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12 Comments

Most important SEO metrics to track?

  1. What is the MOST important SEO Metric you track?
  2. What is the SEO Metric you believe to be underrated by marketers? Why is it important to track?

I'm writing an article around this, so if you want to be included/quoted, please provide your name, link & email

  1. 2

    I would start with Google Search Console's impressions count over time. This is like backing up to the point before anyone even gets to your site. When you can look at the impressions and ranking by search term even without the clicks you can see how you are being displayed and if that's in line with how you want to be. A simple example - I built a website for someone who paints houses, interior, and exterior. He ranked very high locally for "house painting" and variations on the term "painting" but that turned out to be far broader than we wanted - "painting" includes paintings you can hang on the wall, painting may involve DIY. When we deemphasized "painting" and emphasized "painter" everything changed because now you want someone else who can do the work, not the broader concept of painting in general. Think "accounting" versus "accountant" etc. One has the intent you want even if it's fewer impressions.

    I start with impressions to also see what google thinks I am versus what I think I am. this is foundation-level stuff. The click-through RATE is also critical because that's the conversion between what the searcher typed, what google showed, what your website showed, and finally what the searcher really wanted and how badly.

    Things like duration, bounce rate, and page views can all be influenced by your copy and design. these come next - generally, if you can get it all done on a single web page your bounce rate is going to be very near 100% but that doesn't mean anything is broken, duration matters more and pages per visit depend on what the website is all about and how you have broken up the information (depending on its complexity).

    I also like the ratio between users and sessions, if users are coming back to the site more than once or if that ratio trends up then you are looking at higher intent - the sessions to visitors ratio on a website selling Christmas decorations is going to be higher in early December than in April.

    There is just a lot of gold in the basic metrics before getting lost in the weeds. From an SEO client perspective, they generally care about one thing only - did the website generate more sales or leads. That's the very last metric but it's the one that drives everything.

    1. 1

      Can I quote you on this on the piece? Can link back to you

      1. 1

        whatever you like, help yourself, you can link to that reply but I have no other place right now that needs linking back to. Hope it helps.

  2. 2

    Average time spent on a page is underrated. You can only have 1k views on an article but a 10mins time spent average, which means the article is valuable. Compare it with the CTR to confirm if the page is interesting or not.

    1. 2

      It depends on type of site. For example user spend nuch more time for a long landing page than a short catalog which goal is to redirect deep into product page but it's not a worth page.

  3. 1
    1. Though question.

    To only pick one I'd probably pick organic traffic. But it's far from perfect alone.

    Other important KPIs :

    • Keyword reach
    • Impressions
    • Keyword rankings
    • Conversions
    • Linking health
    1. One KPI I like that is underrated is keyword reach ie. how many keywords you are appearing for in top 100. A healthy, growing website should see that number increasing over time.

    It's different from impressions as it is not affected by positions and search volume so it's more independent from other KPIs. That is good because if all your KPI depend on each other and they all go up and down at the same time then you really only have one KPI.

    That's an interesting number because it highlights:
    A. content expansion (ie. more content -> more keywords)
    B. linking effort (ie. more authority -> more keywords for the same amount of content)

    Happy to help further if you have any questions
    Jason Miller
    https://www.seowl.co
    [email protected]

  4. 1

    For my blog I track:

    1. Average time spent on a page
    2. Referrers
    3. Bounce rate

    To get your stuff on top of Google, I believe that links to your content are super important.

  5. 1

    I believe the most underrated SEO metrics is quantity of generated content per month. As a rule marketing agencies or SEO specialists neglect this because it's very time consuming compared to onpage optimisation or link building. But for long time effective result it's the most powerful method.

    Vadim Skopintsev, https://pixiko.com/, [email protected]

  6. 1

    Keeping track of SERP visibility and conversions (or leads) makes sense for most sites. That said, you can track tons of other metrics but they still boil down to conversion (or leads). Here's a nice article about it (if you haven't seen it by now) https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-kpis/

    1. 2

      How do you keep track of SERP visibility?

      1. 2

        In a nutshell, you can get a very rough sense of SERP visibility by comparing your estimated organic search traffic with your competitors. The article
        that I mentioned before explains how to do that https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-kpis/ Hope it helps :)

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