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SEO: What You Should Be Measuring to Track Success

SEO strategy and goals

The first and most important part of determining the metrics to track is to identify a search engine optimization strategy (SEO). Now, SEO can take many forms, but primarily it will help guide you on SEO techniques (page optimization, backlinks, content creation, etc.) that you need to implement to improve your site to achieve your organic goals.

Now, what are your organic goals and how do you decide what is important? A great starting point is to ask yourself, “What do we look forward to out of the site? Direct Sales? Leads? Organic Traffic?”

Your organic goals should be based on what you feel is the primary goal of your site and what your site’s SEO metrics will measure. This will let you know if your site is working above or below expectations. You can get many different goals for your site, ranging from increasing organic sessions so that more people see your content to gain more potential customers.

Just remember, these goals must have a central purpose to the business or else they are just numbers moving up and down. For example, “Improving organic product grade by five points to increase organic sessions and conversion” is a clear goal. Do not choose targets such as “25% increase in sessions”, unless there is a specific benefit to the company, you should avoid this type of goal.

Once you have a strategy for SEO and realistic membership goals in place, you can choose metrics that suit that need. You can measure almost anything on your site, so be liberal with the metrics you follow. Just make sure they are aligned with your organic goals. Many metrics are specific to the type of SEO strategy or tactic you apply, while others apply to any campaign as a primary or secondary metric.

SEO Metrics

All metrics used for SEO must basically measure organic traffic. Finally, it’s great to look at many of these metrics individually, however, it’s best to use them in tandem with each other to show a bigger picture of how the user is interacting with your site.

Keyword Rankings

There is one metric for SEO (SEO) standing above all the rest: SERP (Search Engine Ranking Mode). This is the order in which your site appears on Google (or any search engine) when you enter a keyword related to a page on your site.

The ranking of your site is directly related to traffic and user clickthrough rate (CTR) on your site. It’s important to remember that your site can be arranged differently on mobile devices and desktop. That’s why it’s important to track mobile device and desktop ratings, as it will give you insight into which device is a top priority for improvement. This is because the improvement of mobile devices has become more important to search engines in recent years.

Classification is not a “set and forget” type of metric. It should be monitored continuously from week to week, from month to month, and from year to year. This allows you to understand the effects that seasons may have on your rankings throughout the year.

Finally, it’s important to group labels together. For example, keep all keywords ranked 1-3, 4-10, 10-20, and so on. This allows you to see more trends in your keyword lists. If you see several similar keywords in the same group, you know where you stand in that topic. If you are in the top 10 to 20 years of age, then you know you should move these keywords higher to see a clickthrough rate (CTR) to your site across these groups.

Learn more: SEO Services

Organic Traffic

Although organic traffic metrics are among the most widely used in the digital marketing industry, they are a search engine engine (SEO) – necessary to see how many users are viewing your content. These methods can be used in a variety of ways, including discovery of broken pages, A / B test content, finding the most popular or least popular content on your site, and much more. There are many individual metrics classified under traffic, but the following are the two important ones to follow:

Page views: One copy of the page that loads in your browser window. One person saw one page. One person can have multiple pages within the session.
Sessions: This is a set of interactions that a single user can perform on your site within a specified time frame, typically 30 minutes. This is a standard used by professional SEO as a way to measure the number of people interacting on a site or on a specific page.

User Engagement

This is one of the most important set of metrics you should follow at the site and page levels, as it will give you insight into how your content is performing and the quality of your content. Poor user experience (UX) is reflected in this set of metrics, so if users are dissatisfied with changes to a page or if the content on that page is bad, they will fluctuate. Any time changes are made to the page, this is a large set of metrics to use to see if they were received positively.

In addition, there is something to be observed through these metrics, as mentioned above, which is seen in context rather than individually. An ideal example: When you look at a page that may have a high bounce rate, only based on that, that would be a bad thing, right? Error. Because when you look at other metrics like session duration or conversion rate, the average time on the page may be three minutes and the conversion rate may be high. Therefore, although people regularly move from the page, they consume and convert content on the page. When you look at the context of all these metrics together, you can find a completely different picture.

Bounce Rate: This is the rate at which users start only one session on your site. If a user logs in to your site and leaves without interacting with the page or navigating to the next page, it will run as a bounce.
Exit rate: When the user leaves the site, it is triggered as an exit from the page they left. This only runs if they have more than one page in their session, otherwise they will be counted as bounce.
Sessions Duration: This is the average time a user spends on a site in a single session.
Pages per session: This is an average measure of the number of pages a user visits in a single session.

Conversion Metrics

For any site, especially e-commerce sites, this is an important set of metrics to use. These instructions tell you how many users you have and where they convert. The beauty of these metrics is the diversity they can enjoy, and any action taken on a site can be considered a diversion.

Want to know how many users are subscribing to email messages? Set up a conversion to measure that and you’ll be able to see how much users are converting, giving you insight into how effective your call to action (CTA) is. In addition, you can use small conversions to measure the small actions that users might take to enter your sales path.

Conversion rate: The rate at which users convert a specific goal or ether at the site level or on a per page basis.
Total Conversions: Total number of conversions for a goal (product sale, newsletter subscription, internal link from page to page, etc.). Remember, the conversion only has the same value that you specify for it.
Use the device
In recent years, this has become a more important metric to use, especially with the rapid growth in searches and users on mobile devices. The percentage of the device your users use can help prioritize your site. If you find that there is a great deal of your mobile user base, you can prioritize mobile optimizations on your desktop to keep your mobile experience at the highest level.

You must track both the organic sources and the referral that drive the most traffic through your device. This, coupled with what search engines tend to drive from the largest number of visits, will allow you to understand the path of the user to your site. It’s not uncommon for Google to have more than 50 percent organic search coming to your site, whether mobile or desktop. But if you find that you have significant traffic from a search engine other than Google (Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc.) or a combination of them, it’s worth watching for volatility and opportunity. The other Google search engine to search for is Google Image Search, because it tends to have large traffic associated with it. This group is primarily important because it lights up the user’s path, allowing you to know where you need to optimize your UX.

Device Ratio (Mobile versus Desktop vs. Tablet PC): Percentage of selected devices

Device vs. Mobile vs. Desktop Ratio: The percentage of devices your users choose to access your site.
Google vs. Bing vs. Other Search Engines: Percentage of users who used different search engines to reach the site via organic or referral methods.
Local SEO Metrics
Local SEO strategies are a very common way to increase local search rankings and increase local traffic to your site. But one thing that professional SEO may not be tracking is how your site will interact with the local Google market. Now, what in heck does that mean?

Well, there are some different aspects to consider when it comes to local search engine optimizer rankings. Have Google Business Profiles been set up for your sites? Are you ranked third? How is your site ranked locally in each market you serve? How do you rank your competitors locally in each market you serve? These are all important questions that help give you a clearer picture of your local SEO classifications.

Do not just consider measuring where you rank, but look at how your site is ranked in each market you serve. In addition to tracking local location labels, you must track Google My Business Profile (GMB) classification within Google Maps and the Google Search Group. It’s also a good idea to keep track of the effectiveness of your GMB profiles in generating clicks, calls, and requests for directions to your business or site via GMB Insights. GMB Insights shows you how the user found your profile and how many users see your profile.

Now, when all these metrics are combined, you get a clear map of where you’re looking for the properties you own and how much you’re looking for. This group will also provide you with an idea of ​​how effective your business is in reaching targeted local users. Using this information, you can adjust your local strategy if the performance of a market is weak.

Finally, you should follow how to categorize your competitors on your site to see who is the main competition in a particular area. Especially when you do this through the market, you can get a great idea of ​​who are the main competitors in each market.

Look at these metrics in your GMB Insights:

Direct searches: Find users directly about your business name or address.
Search discoveries: Search for a category, product, or service for you and your profile appears.
Branded searches: User search for a trademark related to your business or site.
Visit your website: A user clicks from a GMB profile to your website.
Directions request: The user prompts directions to your business via Google Maps.
Call you: A user connects to your business or website.
Technical aspects of SEO to measure
Here we get to the technical aspects of SEO standards that you should be familiar with and check regularly. This in turn helps reduce technical issues on your site and increases and maintains your organic rankings.

Page Speed

Let’s start with one easy: page speed. This is a simple measure of how fast your pages load. It’s important to measure page speed regularly because it affects UX for your site and how users interact with your site. In addition, it has recently become a more convenient classification factor as it has a severe impact on the UX of a site. For example, if the page loads very slowly, it is likely that the user will leave or bounce off that page before it is loaded. Well, in Google’s eyes, this is a big problem. Because even if you have great content, and if users have to wait to download it, they are more likely to find another source.

HTTP status codes

This is more complicated, as there is a lot of vocabulary to learn how to understand the meaning of each status code as it relates to your site. Now, the HTTP status code is a three-digit code sent from the response server to the user’s request. They are separated into five categories. To simplify this, here’s a list of status code categories and meanings to help you understand individual status codes later:

Informatics
Success
Redirection
Client error
Server error

Individual status codes

There are many different individual status codes for a variety of different requests that you can track in Google Search Console. So just remember, if you encounter a status code that you do not know, submit it to your web developer for help. There are many different status codes, but the most important status codes are:

200: This is the easiest code to remember, as it is just a successful request that moves to the server. There are no issues to report.

301: Here things start to rot. 301 means a web page that has been replaced with a new page and that this replacement is permanent. This tells Google when a change from an old URL to a new one. In other words, this means Google can link the old URL link metrics to the new URL.

302: This is similar to 301, except that it is not a permanent change in the URL. This status code indicates that Google will retain the old URL in the Google index but will show the new user. If this redirect is retained for an extended period of time, Google automatically associates it with a 301 redirect and updates the index.

404: The 404 status code is used to indicate that the URL does not exist on your site. This can be due to a variety of issues ranging from broken links that Google robots tried to crawl to remove a page from your site on purpose. This status code is widely used in the industry and must be closely monitored at all times by reporting crawl errors in the Google Search Console. The number of 404 sites on the site can be a warning sign that something has occurred systematically across the site, or it may be a list of pages you’ve removed. Now, it is important to note that you should not leave a page as 404 if you accidentally remove it. Instead, use 301 redirect to send traffic to a related page.

Soft 404: This is a Google-specific code that Google uses only in its index. It is a code that returns a 404 to the user. But for the browser, it will result in a 200 status code. This can cause problems such as removed pages that are indexed and added to Google search results. This takes away the press crawling budget from the pages that you already want to appear in Google search results.

500s: These are real problems you should worry about when it comes to status codes. A 500 level status code tells you that something is disabled by the server and needs developer attention immediately. This can have long-term consequences if your site contains a lot of these. If you accumulate too many 500s, you will begin to lose the efficiency of crawling on your site, and Google can stop crawling altogether if it is not regularly observed. Keep in mind that if you see many of these items appear in the Search Console, it’s important that your webmaster or developer can see how to resolve them.

 

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