What is the toughest task for an SEO Specialist?
Wanna guess?
Well, it is not the hectic workload they always seem to have.
It is measuring the rate of success of their work.
Strange, isn’t it?
If you have been in the field of digital marketing, you would know that one cannot always rely on search engine results.
Search Engines like Google might take an indefinite amount of time to get your pages indexed. And we don’t have time for that.
So, how exactly do we track the success of our SEO efforts?
To be able to do that, one has to devise a cohesive methodology that involves highly reliable factors and variables SEO depends on.
In the year 2019, we just cannot limit ourselves to individual metrics like backlinks or page rankings.
Therefore, in this article, we have brought together a few Search Engine Optimization Metrics that you should consider while trying to figure out its effectiveness.
So, let’s stop beating the bush and get on with the content!
1. Organic Traffic
SEO is useless unless it brings you a significant amount of relevant traffic.
Therefore, to create a powerful impact with reporting your SEO performance, one must consider involving organic sessions.
This metric can be tracked on a month-over-month basis. An increase in the number of visitors directed from search engines is a definite sign of SEO performance.
While assessing your SEO performance, you don’t want to rely on trends but on numbers.
A quantifiable proof will help you prove your SEO efforts evidently. It is concrete proof of the number of visitors increasing on your website.
This metric can easily be tracked by using Google Analytics set up for your website.
2. Organic Conversions
Once you start gaining enough organic traffic, it’s time to put the traffic under quality check.
While increasing the number of monthly visitors is important, gaining high-quality and relevant traffic is imperative.
After all this hard work, gaining irrelevant traffic is the last thing you want. It’s true that you can start getting traffic generated from irrelevant search terms.
Tracking organic conversions is the only way out to check the quality of your website traffic.
Organic conversions metric can be tracked by setting up Goals in Google Analytics.
3. Keyword Rankings
No matter how much upheaval RankBrain and modern content creation techniques have caused, one should still fall back on Keyword Ranking metric.
Today, due to personalization, the search results are not similar most of the times. This fact can be utilized when tracking keyword ranking.
When your website achieves better ranking for one keyword, it usually starts getting a better overall ranking. This happens mostly in the case of long-tail keywords. Hence, the keyword ranking metric is effective in showing the performance of your SEO campaigns.
In case you observe other important SEO metrics improving but your website’s ranking doesn’t improve for the targeted keywords, it clearly means that the right keyword selection is required.
4. New Backlinks and Referring Domains
You read that right. We are talking backlinks here.
A recent study by Backlinko has found a strong correlation between website rankings and number of backlinks.
We don’t want to believe that, but that’s how it is even in 2019. An effective SEO performance might still be determined by the number of backlinks a website has.
If there are two websites with almost similar on-page metrics, the one with more number of quality backlinks will get more preference by Google.
It is important, therefore, to have a good track of backlinks and referring domains.
Although just creating more and more quality backlinks might not lead to better rankings, it definitely is a positive sign for your website’s SEO performance.
5. Authority Metrics
As discussed above, having an impressive number of backlinks is not enough. It’s the quality of backlinks as well as the improving authority of the website that matters.
If you are from the SEO fraternity, you might already know what Domain Authority means.
It’s a measure of the authority of a domain name on a scale of 0-100. The higher the Domain Authority, the more reliable and trustworthy the domain is. This termed was coined by Moz.
Authority metrics like Domain Authority and Trust Flow, if show a positive sign, then you can say that your SEO efforts are yielding better results.
6. Local Visibility
If you are managing local SEO campaigns, this one is for you.
Local Visibility metric is very important when it comes to targeting local potential customers online.
To be able to do exactly that, you will be required to track specific metrics, making sure you are receiving organic traffic from the right target audience.
To keep track of Local Visibility, one can leverage a few of the local SEO metrics like Google Maps Ranking, Google My Business Insights, and Session Location.
7. Mobile Traffic
While conducting an SEO audit for a website, it is important to check the site ranking on all major devices. Google’s announcement of executing a complete switch to mobile-first index has made it all the more important to have a mobile-first website.
Mobile searches are different than traditional desktop searches. The former uses fewer keywords and 20% of all its searches are made using voice commands.
Given the fact that almost 60% of all online searches happen over a smartphone, tracking SEO metric like mobile traffic will surface all mobile-friendliness issues, usage patterns of the target audience, and shortcomings when it comes to targeting mobile-only search terms.
Over to You
Search Engine Optimization is not a sprint. It is a marathon which will require a lot of practice and experimentation.
The above SEO metrics will definitely help you evolve your Search Engine Optimization campaigns in 2019 and beyond.