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Originally Posted On: https://popularposting.com/the-most-important-seo-metrics-that-you-need-to-track-at-all-times/

 

In today’s digital world, SEO is crucial to the success of your business.

But it definitely isn’t cheap. Heck, the average small business owner spends around $500 on SEO every month. The same source goes on to explain that some companies pay out as much as $5,000!

If you’re investing that much money in SEO, then it’s vital the ROI justifies it.

And that’s where tracking key SEO metrics come into play. With a solid grasp of your performance, you’ll be able to determine how effective your current strategies are proving to be.

Want to learn more about the metrics you should be monitoring throughout the year? Let us help. In this post, we’re going through the most important SEO KPIs and types of metrics to track in 2022.

Organic Traffic

The primary objective of any SEO endeavor is to rank in the top spot of SERPs. Why? To drive lots of organic traffic to your website!

The higher you go, the more traffic you get, which should result in more conversions.

In the realm of SEO metrics, then, they don’t get much more important than organic sessions. Tracking this metric reveals whether or not your website’s getting the month-over-month traffic increases that prove your SEO efforts are working.

You can track organic traffic via Google Analytics.

Head to your dashboard, navigate to the default audience overview, and click “Add Segment”. From there, click on “Organic Traffic” from the menu and hit “Apply”. This will then show you organic traffic as a percentage of overall web traffic.

Backlinks

There are all sorts of ways to make your content rank higher, faster. However, getting backlinks from other authority sites is one of the most effective.

Each link is a vote of confidence as far as Google’s concerned. After all, why would anybody link to your website if they didn’t think it was good enough to show their readers? The more quality links you get, the better.

Tracking the number of backlinks your site receives requires special software. Select a tool (such as Moz.com) that updates on a regular basis, shows whether the links are do-follow or no-follow, and reveals the long-term trend of how many backlinks you’re accruing/losing.

For a free alternative, you can use Google Search Console. Head to the dashboard, navigate to “Search Traffic” and hit “Links to Your Site”. This will give you an idea of the latest links you’ve received, although it isn’t 100% accurate.

Page Speed

Search engines place great importance on the user experience (UX) of any website they feature on SERPs. For good reason too!

They rely on people using their service, so the last thing they want is to disappoint them with substandard content. As a webmaster, then, it’s your job to ensure the user experience of your site is top-notch.

And a big part of that comes down to page speed.

People want any webpage they click on to load fast. Too slow and they grow impatient- clicking back to look elsewhere for answers instead. Knowing this, Google now rewards websites that are quick and punishes those that run slowly!

That’s why it’s crucial to track page speed (and work hard to speed it up).

Google has made this simple with its PageSpeed Insights tool. Use it to receive a) a measure of how fast your pages are and b) ideas for how to improve them. Depending on what you find, it may help to hire a technical SEO agency to speed things up.

Keyword Rankings

Another central component of an effective SEO strategy is targeting the right keywords and phrases in your content. By choosing wisely and incorporating them into your website, blog posts, and videos (etc), search engines can find, analyze, interpret, and rank your content with greater ease.

By tracking your keywords, you’ll see how your content’s faring online. As your ranking for them goes up, your traffic should increase too!

Furthermore, improved rankings for a single keyword often indicate improvements across the board. Track your keywords, then, and you’ll get a sense of how effective your optimization efforts have been. And if you don’t see any boost?

Then you learn to start targeting less competitive, longer-tail keywords.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is one example of what’s called an “engagement metric”. Expressed as a percentage, it tells you many visitors left your site without clicking any of the links on it. In other words, they saw one page and left.

This is important because it gives Google a clue as to the quality of your content.

People who like what they see tend to stick around for more! They’ll click on internal links to related content, search the site for more news/entertainment, visit your About Page to learn more about you, and so on. Those who are less engaged won’t.

The result? Low bounce rates lead to higher rankings.

Track yours in Google Analytics by clicking on “Behavior”, then “Overview”. It’s located under the graph on the right-hand side.

Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)

High rankings mean nothing if people don’t click on your content! So, do yourself a favor and start monitoring your CTR as well. A crucial metric for assessing success, it’ll reveal everything from the relevance of your keywords (irrelevant content will receive fewer clicks) to the strength of your titles (quality titles earn more clicks).

Start by logging into Google Search Console and hitting “Performance” on the left. This will provide a report that shows you the CTR of your pages and queries. You can also filter results by device.

Don’t Forget These SEO Metrics

Unfortunately, spending thousands of dollars on SEO never guarantees results! Only by tracking key SEO metrics like the ones we’ve discussed above will you learn if the outcomes justify the expenditure.

With any luck, the information in this post will help you do it! Would you like to read more articles like this one? Spend some time browsing the rest of our site today.