There is an almost infinite number of metrics you may track when assessing the efficacy of your SEO strategy or performing an SEO audit.
Most important SEO indicators to track
Organic traffic
The most basic explanation is… Without spending money on ads, the SERPs are a great source of free, organic traffic.
Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your website as a result of a user conducting a search using terms related to your business or niche, rather than using a paid advertisement. Your organic search traffic should increase over time if your SEO efforts are successful.
The proportion of clicks (CTR)
The percentage of individuals who visit your site via the search engine results pages is known as your organic click-through rate. A 10% CTR means that out of every 1,000 individuals who view your page listing in the search results, 100 people actually click through to your website.
How well your listing (including the title, meta description, and URL) is received and how much interest it generates is measured by organic click-through rate (CTR).
Exit rate
Exit pages are the pages that users see right before they leave your website, hence the name.
The most problematic pages are the ones that cause visitors to give up and leave your site. Exit pages are the pages on your site where the majority of visitors leave, thus keeping tabs on them is crucial.
If you see that a significant percentage of your visitors are leaving immediately after visiting a certain page, it may be time to revise that page’s content.
Session page count
The average number of pages a user views before leaving your site is known as “pages per session,” and it is a crucial indicator of how engaged your users are with your content. The more pages people view and the longer they spend on your site, the better.
You may view the average number of pages viewed per session by referral source in Google Analytics.
If this measure is low, it could mean that your material isn’t interesting or useful enough to encourage readers to navigate to other sections of your site. Or, it could suggest that the layout of your site is confusing. The same advice given for popular exit pages should be used here.
Normal time for a page to load
When it comes to search engine optimization, your site’s speed (on both desktop and mobile) is crucial. (and user experience).
A Picture Source
The time it takes for a page to completely load is its average load time. This indicator may be seen by going to “Behavior” > “Site Speed”. Then, you can check the load times for specific pages or see the overall average.
Essential Elements of the Web
The quality of your user experience (UX), which includes how quickly and efficiently your pages load, is becoming an increasingly important ranking factor for Google.
Traditional performance measures, such as load time and DOMContentLoaded, concentrate on details that are simple to assess but don’t always map to what consumers value. Therefore, it is possible to have a website with good load times but terrible UX if you only optimise the average load time.
In 2020, Google improved upon the aforementioned speed metric by adding Core Web Vitals. These metrics focus on the user experience and provide a finer-grained measurement of how long it takes a web page to load.
Referring domains and backlinks
In terms of search engine rankings, backlinks are really important. In addition, the number of referring domains appears to strongly correlate with search engine ranks, according to a recent analysis of over 11 million Google search results.
All of the links from other websites that lead to yours are counted as backlinks, while the links from individual domains are counted as referring domains.
When it comes to backlinks, quality trumps number every time. Ten connections from very credible sources are far preferable to one hundred links from unreliable sources. Each link you acquire can assist your SEO, however links from unrelated domains have a greater impact than links from related domains.
Most popular search terms
It’s important to keep an eye on how your website’s rankings for target keywords change as you try to optimise it for those keywords.
Understanding your current organic search visibility share and which phrases you’re already ranking for will help you determine whether to further optimise for those keywords or target other keywords you want to rank for but aren’t yet.
Using a programme like SEMrush, you can monitor where your keywords rank. See how your search engine rankings are shifting over time and how your site’s overall visibility is growing with the help of the Organic Search Positions report.
Concluding Remarks
Knowing your SEO KPIs is crucial in today’s environment of ever-evolving search engine algorithms and SEO best practises. If you aren’t already keeping tabs on the top nine metrics discussed above, you should start. Fortunately, you can easily track all these SEO data and begin making continuous improvements using a few inexpensive tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Ahrefs (or SEMrush).