Every business in any industry crafts diverse strategies to achieve success in SEO. Although setting up a business is easy, getting customers can be demanding, especially when considering other businesses online. SEO can increase a website’s searchability and visibility to make it easier for customers to find you online. Measuring SEO performance allows you to identify which tactics work well and which ones don’t.
SEO tracking techniques are the best ways not to spend time or money on things that aren’t generating the expected profit. So, how do you determine if your SEO strategy is working? Do you know how to track SEO performance?
Each website is different, so a particular metric may not be relevant to another website. There are a few key metrics that are important for all websites. ADVDMS shares the key metrics and monitoring tools that track SEO performance. SEO tracking allows an in-depth look at the most effective strategies for your website. It gives you that guarantee that your efforts for SEO produce tangible results.
Why Should You Measure Your SEO Success Rate
Search engine marketing can be done in-house, or you can hire an SEO agency to manage your campaign. It is essential to understand how your SEO efforts are performing to enable you to identify and correct any issues.
A digital presence is essential for any marketing strategy, whether you are a freelance photographer or a party supplier building an e-commerce website. Implementing a solid SEO strategy will help you increase your website’s visibility and attract new customers.
SEO remains one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. Implementing an SEO strategy is just the beginning, and it is important to continue tracking SEO results. This guide will cover the most important metrics marketers can use to measure SEO performance.
Now, let’s check the best ways to measure your SEO results.
How Do You Measure and Track Your SEO Success?
Today, site owners have unprecedented access to data about their SEO performance.
You can use a website positioning tool, a SERP checker, or an SEO rankings monitor for your SEO analysis, but these only provide a snapshot of your SEO strategy’s successes and failures. This data will not be enough to track SEO rankings and your overall performance on an ongoing basis. It can be challenging to reduce the amount of data into manageable metrics for your reports.
You may have noticed an increase or decrease in web traffic. It could be due to a competitor optimizing for the exact keywords or because your site was subject to an over-optimization penalty. SEO tracking metrics provide a better picture of your SEO strategy by comparing your website to other sites on all search engines.
These data points can offer valuable insights, and it’s important to make this clear. If you are looking for information about a particular tactic or page’s performance, you can almost always find it through an SEO search analysis.
The following are the most important metrics to measure your SEO performance:
Bounce Rate
A “bounce” is when a visitor leaves your site after landing on one page. Your “bounce rate” is the percentage of visitors who do this.
It’s an excellent indicator of your site’s content and what users expect from it when they select one of your pages in the search results. If your visitors leave your site often and go to a different page, your page doesn’t have the information they need.
However, if your bounce rate is low, you can feel confident that the pages you rank in search will provide what visitors are looking for and help you reach your SEO performance goals.
Organic Ranking
Organic traffic is one of the most important metrics to measure SEO performance because the number represents all visitors to your site that is only coming from organic search. While overall traffic can indicate your site’s performance, focusing on organic traffic will give you a better idea of your SEO strategy’s impact.
SEO strategies are designed to increase your visibility in search engines for keywords that relate to your industry and business. It stands to reason that this will increase the number of people who visit your site from search results.
You can start measuring SEO performance by tracking organic traffic over time. It’s one of the most reliable metrics that you can obtain.
Use Google Analytics to keep track of organic search traffic changes. The same levels of organic traffic are not important, but they should always show an upward trend.
Your strategy is likely to be successful if your organic traffic is increasing. You should change your strategy if your organic traffic is declining or flatlining.
Click-through Rate
The CTR (or click-through rate) from search results to a page can give insight into how optimized your page title or meta description is. This data can be found in Google Search Console.
Your CTR can be used to measure how effective your listings are at generating clicks for your site.
Ranking high on Google is essential. But what good is it if you don’t generate any traffic?
There is still much debate over whether your CTR should be considered a ranking factor. However, it’s not crucial. The important thing is that the greater your CTR, the more traffic you get for your site.
Keyword Ranking
Your website and content must be optimized to rank high in search engine results for long-tail and specific keywords. A keyword is any term that includes anything that has been searched using a search engine. If a single phrase or word is found on a search engine results page or a SERP checker, it is a keyword.
Google searches are a simple way to track SEO rankings for keywords related to your products or business. These results will reveal where your website ranks in relation to the competitive keywords. It is vital to rank on the first page of Google and to be as high as possible. Remember, more than 25% of Google search results are clicked on by users.
A thorough keyword analysis will help you understand the performance of your keywords. An analysis can uncover new search terms. It can help you identify keywords you rank strongly for, keywords you are weak for, and keywords that your competitors are ranking for.
SERP Visibility
Search engine visibility is the frequency that your domain appears in search results for keywords it ranks for. These results include organic results, ads, and search engine results pages (SERP) features. Search engine visibility shows how often the domain appears in search results. In other words, it gives you an overview of your overall SEO performance and search volume.
If you are looking at how to track SEO performance and how to track the early results of website optimizing, the search engine visibility score can be a great tool. You can track search visibility and see positive dynamics before your site attracts visitors. This score could be a critical driver for all SEO search-based activities.
Backlinks
Google considers backlinks to be one of the top-ranking factors for websites. We found that backlinks are 2.2 times more likely to lead to URLs at the first position than URLs at the second, and this is what we call a high-volume spike.
Your backlinks can give you valuable information about the progress of your link-building strategies. Also, you should pay attention to links that you did not build. These links could be opportunities for you to explore in the future.
Backlinks allow you to track backlinks numbers as well as refer to domains easily. Measuring SEO performance with backlinks allows you to assess your site’s progress in link-building, identify new backlinks, and determine when backlinks have been deleted. This information can be used to help you evaluate your link-building efforts. Your current strategy is likely to succeed if you have strong follow links and new sites linking directly to your content.
Page Speed
Page speed is an important factor that influences all other metrics. The dollars per page view will double if you improve your site’s speed by reducing it to two seconds.
Not only is page speed important for ranking your website, but it also impacts your conversion rates and bounce rates. Google’s page speed industry benchmarks found a strong correlation between slow websites and low bounce rates. The likelihood of people leaving your website increases as page load times increase. For example, a website taking 10 seconds to load can lead to a 120% increase in bounce rates.
Optimizing your website is important. It’s also important to check whether any changes affect load times. This is a simple metric that can be tracked using Google’s PageSpeed insights.
SEO analysis can help you understand the critical aspects of your site’s user experience and help you identify any problems before they affect your SEO performance.
Conversion Rate
The overall effect of your SEO strategy on sales is called the conversion rate. This is the most important metric for evaluating your website’s success. You need a website that showcases your products or services and converts leads into sales.
You can track your conversion rates by setting up goals in Google Analytics. With one of the pre-configured templates, you can create goals. You can then input goals for visitors, such as reading an article, watching a video, or becoming an email subscriber.
As a baseline, you can use the global average website conversion rate based on multiple market conversion rates. Using this baseline will allow you to track how many people visit your website and whether they convert. This information can personalize your website’s content and offers to increase traffic to your site.
Time Spent On Page
This SEO performance metric measures how well your content matches user intent. If a user searches for a specific keyword on Google and lands on your page, your site has fulfilled their intent. A high page score indicates that visitors are satisfied with your content based on their keywords to find your site.
Google Analytics allows you to track how long visitors spend on your website. An SEO search analysis with this tool will allow you to compare the time spent on the page with your average reading time.
Domain Authority
SEO strategies should aim to increase a site’s authority in Google’s eyes.
Google considers domains with more authority to be more trustworthy and easier to rank. Third-party tools, such as MOZ use domain authority to determine how Google will rank your website based on its link authority. To measure the impact of your link-building activities on your ranking in SERPs, you may track your domain authority over time.
Seeing your Domain Authority increase is a good indicator that your SEO efforts have been successful.
How Long Will It Take to See Results?
Now that you know why SEO takes so long and what metrics you should use to track your performance let us get to the bottom of it and answer the question: How long will tracking SEO performance take?
The long answer is all the factors tied to your SEO strategy. You can see results in as little as four to six months if you target keywords with low competition.
If your SEO strategy is effective, you can track growth in traffic and conversions within six months to one year. It can take longer to achieve solid rankings and results with keywords high in competition and pages with high authority.
Remember that your SEO strategy must also adapt to the changes made by Google. Your digital marketing and SEO search approach will change as the industry evolves.
Manage Your SEO Campaign With ADVDMS
SEO has become increasingly complex, making it harder to measure success. It is no longer possible to rely on one or two metrics to tell the story about your SEO efforts. Instead, track multiple metrics, from backlinks and rankings to conversions and engagement.
ADVDMS’ SEO services in Denver can help you look at SEO tracking metrics to determine how your SEO efforts impact your business.
Get in touch with us today and learn how we’ll align your SEO strategies with your business goals. You might be surprised by the results.
