Top 5 Metrics for Monitoring SEO Performance the Smart Way
Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to modern businesses. It's a cost effective marketing strategy that will boost your visibility, presence and credibility online. It's a good way to make your business and your website more visible and accessible to your target audience. However, SEO takes time before you can start seeing results. That's why it's important to track the progress of your SEO activities, in order to determine whether your efforts are paying off or not.
By tracking valuable metrics, you'll be able to determine the effectiveness of your strategies and SEO activities. Businesses that are new to the market and thus unfamiliar with SEO, usually don't know which metrics to track. They oftentimes believe that SEO isn't working so they abandon it altogether. This is a big mistake because although SEO takes time to produce results, it can be a great advantage to your business in the long run. Here are a few metrics for monitoring SEO performance the smart way.
Organic website traffic
One of the best indicators of your SEO campaign's performance is monitoring organic website traffic. Why organic traffic and not any traffic? The main reason is that SEO helps your business grow organically, without the help from paid advertisement. For instance, website visitors who arrived via keyword search or via backlinks in your content posts.
The more organic traffic you have indicates that your SEO strategies are quite effective. You can leverage Google Analytics tool to help you track this metric. Moreover, you can specify only to monitor website traffic that originates from organic sources. What's more, SEO is known to experience changes. Search engines, such as Google change their algorithms frequently. Make sure you keep up with these changes so that you're able to maintain the efficiency of your SEO strategies.
Bounce rate
Another important metric when it comes to website traffic is bounce rate. Bounce rate indicates how many visitors left immediately after landing on your pages. The main reason this metric is important for monitoring SEO performance is that it shows you whether or not your landing pages are captivating enough and optimized properly to engage website visitors.
Well-optimized landing pages are able to influence visitors to remain on your website and explore it further. It also directly influences other SEO factors and metrics, such as page views, average time spent on page, click through rate and so on. A bounce rate of 40% or lower is considered acceptable. Anything higher than that and it means you'll need to redesign and optimize your landing page and call to action (CTA) buttons.
Page load time
Page load time is a crucial metric for your website and SEO performance. Website speed plays an essential role in customer experience. That being said, both speed and customer satisfaction are important factors in determining your rankings. If your pages take too long to load, your visitors will abandon them. As a matter of fact, a single second delay in load time may result in a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, 11% decrease in page views and a 7% decrease in conversion rates.
Therefore, aside from having to ensure you meet the expectations of online consumers, you have to ensure your website speed is up to snuff. Make sure you optimize your website properly to improve page load time or consult your host provider. If you opt for a cPanel hosting solution, you can tweak your website on your own to make it faster. Just make sure you know what you're doing before you start optimizing it yourself.
Domain authority
Domain authority (DA) represents the credibility of your website. The higher your domain authority rank is, the more reputable your website is. Online consumers prefer to visit websites with a high DA, because they perceive those as more trustworthy sources than others. Also, with a high DA score, you'll experience more website traffic and conversions. That's why it's important to monitor your DA and ensure it doesn't go down.
The best way to achieve this is through creating top quality backlinks and guest posting on other credible and relevant sources. Backlinks are links leading back to your website that are included in content you publish across various media channels. The more relevant and engaging your content is and the more credible sources you publish it on, the higher your domain authority will be.
Keyword rankings
The essence of SEO is ranking for the right keywords that your customers use when doing their online search. The better your rankings are, the easier will it be for your customers to find you. However, online consumers aren't always using the same keywords to find something specific online.
That's why you must always monitor this metric in order to stay up to date. You must make sure that you rank for keywords that your target audience is using, so that you can be available to them at all times. You can use a Google Search Console to track specific keywords for your SEO performance.
SEO is a very effective marketing strategy, but only if you invest enough effort into it. SEO demands constant monitoring, because trends and rules change quite often. That's why it's important to monitor valuable metrics, so that your efforts will pay off in the end.