In the evolving digital marketing landscape, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remains crucial to driving organic website traffic. With constant shifting from Google algorithms and user behavior, tracking the success of your website can be challenging to understand, especially if you are unsure of what you are looking for.
Tracking your metrics helps you gauge the health of your website and provides strategies for content optimization. By focusing on your website’s traffic, engagement, and technical SEO, you can efficiently tailor your approaches to achieve your business goals.
Tracking Traffic Metrics
Traffic metrics provide insight into where your website visitors come from and how they interact with your content. As one of the most critical factors in SEO, traffic drives visibility and allows your website to rise in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). A few metrics you can track to get an idea of your traffic levels are:
Organic Traffic: Organic traffic comes from unpaid sources, and the number of visitors who visit your website from search engines is measured. These metrics can be easily found in Google Analytics and act as a reflection of your SEO efforts.
Impressions: This shows how many times your website has appeared in the SERPs for relevant keywords. Impressions can indicate how well your brand awareness efforts are performing and provide insight into how visible your website is so that you can make necessary changes to your strategy.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR measures how many people see your website in a search result and decide to click on it. High CTRs indicate that you are receiving an excellent response to SERP listings, while low CTRs can be an indication of issues with your title tags and meta descriptions or that your content isn’t following Google’s quality criteria for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Search Visibility: SEO tools like SEMRush can help you find your search visibility rating. Measuring your visibility levels can tell how likely others are to see your site in the SERPs and aggregate your website’s ranking position for target keywords.
When looking at your traffic metrics, going beyond the results for organic traffic can provide more insight into your audience’s engagement and the success of your website content. Using tools in Google Analytics lets you see where your traffic is coming from and how you can continue to appeal to these audiences.
Tracking Engagement Metrics
Keeping your audience engaged is the next step in ensuring they interact with your website and brand. Tracking metrics can help you recognize which pieces of content drive successful interactions with your audience and which fall short of your goals. These metrics can help you determine whether your expectations for engagement are being met:
Average session duration: This metric measures how long users spend on your website after visiting a page. More time spent on a page can indicate a high level of engagement, as users are likely to peruse content over a more extended period. Less time spent on a page can be a significant indicator of little to no engagement opportunities and can provide insight into what pages should be optimized for engagement.
Pages per Session: Similar to average session duration, the pages per session metrics provide insight into how much a user has explored your website. When a user navigates your website, they will explore some of your website content and pages to find the information they need. When there is a low number of pages per session, this can suggest that users might not be finding the information that they are looking for. Alternatively, this can indicate that your website’s internal linking structures need improvement.
Time on Page: While the average session duration and pages per session metrics measure overall website engagement, time on page provides insight into how long users stay on individual pages.
Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is when users leave your website after viewing a page. High bounce rates have the ability to indicate that landing pages fell short of the user’s expectations for content or were generally unhelpful. Factors impacting users' expectations for their experience include slow website loading times and unhelpful or offensive content.
Conversion Rate: Conversion rates are measured when a percentage of visitors to your website complete a desired action on your website, such as making a purchase, making an appointment, or submitting a form. Conversion rates are crucial for SEO and are one of the primary metrics for gauging your website’s effectiveness in meeting your business goals.
Tracking Technical SEO
Tracking the technical health of your website is important to maintaining SEO. As Google algorithms use website health as a deciding factor for which websites get ranked, maintaining good metrics can show the algorithm that your website has good authority and is worthy of being ranked. By maintaining and keeping an eye on these metrics, you can ensure that your site is healthy and meeting SEO qualifications:
Mobile friendliness: With today’s society shifting towards mobile technology, having a mobile-friendly website is now a requirement. Utilizing Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can provide insight and information on how to improve your user’s mobile experience and how you can fix them for SEO optimization.
Core Web Vitals: Gathering vitals is crucial to understanding how healthy your site is and its ability to thrive over time. Core web vital metrics include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to determine and assess your website’s loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. Improving these Core Web Vitals can ensure that the user’s experience is good and can send positive feedback to search engines that increase positive outcomes for success during major algorithm updates.
Crawl Errors: When search engines crawl your websites, they gather information on what pages are properly indexed. In Google search console, you can find the metrics for any crawl errors that might be impacting your search rankings and find solutions on how to improve your website health.
Indexed Pages: Indexed pages are pages that are included in search engine results. With the goal of SEO pushing for increased visibility, low numbers of indexed pages can be a major indicator that technical issues are taking place and are preventing search engines from crawling your content.
Website Speed: Slow website speed can not only frustrate users, but they can also strongly impact your website’s health, bounce rate, and conversion rate. When websites load slowly, the user experience is impacted and can negatively affect SEO.
How Metrics Impact SEO
Tracking website metrics provides lots of information and value when it comes to optimizing your website for peak performance and SEO rankability. While many tend to ignore their metrics, taking the time to analyze metrics is important to ensure that your marketing goals are being met and that your audiences and users are having a greater experience. When reviewing the numbers from your website metrics, be sure to keep the following in mind:
User Experiences: Prioritizing user experience is one of the most important metrics to consider. When metrics such as bounce rate or conversions are low, they can indicate that users aren’t getting all of the information they need or are having a poor experience with your website.
Goals and Progress: After gathering information on your metrics, set realistic SEO goals and business objectives. Whether your goal is to increase visibility and rankings or to increase the amount of conversions on your website, make sure that you track and make note of your progress for each goal.
Stay Informed on Algorithm Updates: Search engine algorithms are constantly being implemented and updated. When updates occur, some metrics can be weighted more than others and SEO best practices can change. Staying updated on the most recent updates allows you to ensure that your SEO strategy is up-to-date and that you are prioritizing the metrics that matter the most.
Using Metrics to Your Advantage
By tracking your metrics and using them to tailor your digital marketing strategies, you will have the power to make informed decisions and improve your visibility. By making comparisons over time, you can see what's working for your campaigns and what else you can do to improve your performance.
Navigating SEO and making data-driven decisions can be difficult. Stay on top of the SEO trends with Peaks Digital Marketing. Our team of experienced SEO specialists analyzes website data and metrics and leverages data-driven approaches that help your business thrive. As one of the top SEO agencies in Denver, we want you and your business to reach your summit. Contact us today at (720) 432-7115 for a free consultation and proposal.
