One of the best things about SEO (and other digital marketing strategies) is the sheer amount of data you can collect.
On the one hand, the ability to gather vast swathes of data from analytics and SEO tools means it has never been easier to measure your SEO success. On the other hand, it makes it hard to concentrate on the few core metrics that help you improve.
I’m here to help you solve this contradiction and tell you once and for all which are the best SEO metrics to track.
In this article, I’ll break down all of the SEO metrics you could track, the SEO metrics that are important to track, the ones that are pure vanity, and how to match KPIs with your goals.
Key Takeaways
- SEO metrics are data points and key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you track the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
- There are several must-track SEO metrics like organic traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, and conversions.
- I consider some SEO metrics like bounce rate, exit rate, and average session duration as vanity metrics that aren’t worth your time.
- Several tools can help you track SEO metrics, including Ubersuggest, Google Analytics, and Semrush.
- It’s important to choose SEO metrics that align with your business and marketing objectives. If you aren’t interested in building more backlinks, for example, then it doesn’t make sense to waste time and energy monitoring how many you have.
Table of Contents
- Key Takeaways
- What Are SEO Metrics and Why Are They Important?
- SEO Metrics to Track
- SEO Metrics That Aren’t As Important As You Think
- Tools To Help Track SEO Metrics
- Choosing the Right SEO Metrics For Your Needs
- FAQs
- Conclusion
What Are SEO Metrics and Why Are They Important?
SEO metrics are any data points or key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you understand whether your SEO efforts are working.
Some, like page speed and click-through rate, focus on the performance of your website. Others, like domain authority and keyword rankings, measure the strength of your site’s SEO success by referencing data from search engines and the wider web.
Tracking SEO metrics is essential if you want to know whether your efforts are paying off. If you’ve got pages ranking well for specific keywords, your organic click-throughs are increasing, and you’re attracting organic traffic, then it’s safe to say you’re doing something right.
On the contrary, if you’re struggling to rank in the SERPs for your chosen keywords, you’re not securing enough conversions, or you’re not picking up quality backlinks, that should tell you something is up.
Tracking SEO performance metrics can inform your strategy. If things are trending in the right direction, you can hold course. If not, you can use metrics to identify areas to improve.
SEO Metrics to Track
OK, now I’ve covered the basics, let’s go over the best SEO metrics to track. I recommend tracking all of these metrics to gain a solid understanding of your site’s SEO performance.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the visitors your site receives from unpaid search engine results. This is the exact traffic search engine optimization is designed to attract, so it’s obvious to track how many organic visitors your site receives every day/month/year.
Organic traffic doesn’t just measure how many visitors your site receives, though. It’s also a reflection of how well your site ranks in search engines. High-quality content, on-page and off-page SEO can all contribute to organic traffic when executed well.
There are several reasons you’d want to track and increase your organic traffic. These visitors have a better chance of converting as these visitors actively searched for something related to your business. Additionally, organic traffic can increase brand awareness, improve customer retention, and is cost-effective.
You can track your organic traffic for free with Google Analytics. Find the traffic report by going to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
Indexed Pages
When a search engine indexes a page, it stores it in its database and can serve it to users when it’s related to the search they’ve conducted. It’s no surprise, then, that you want to have as much of your site indexed as possible.
The quickest way to see how many of your site’s pages Google has indexed is to analyze your page indexing report in Google Search Console.
If Google isn’t indexing a large chunk of your pages, then there may be problems with your site’s structure, quality, or accessibility. Basically, something is stopping Google from accessing and indexing your pages.
You can improve indexation by fixing errors, adding proper canonicals and improving your internal linking. The action you need to take depends on the specific indexation errors your website is experiencing. Learn more about indexation error types and potential fixes.
Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings measure where your site appears in the SERPs for specific keywords. You can use a keyword tracking tool like Ubersuggest to automatically track keyword rankings and see which keywords drive the most organic traffic.
In theory, the higher your position, the more organic traffic you get.
One thing that can throw a wrinkle into this, though, are rich results. AI Overviews are top of mind for most SEOs right now, and for good reason, but there are other results generated with AI that can also impact your CTR. These include:
- Featured snippets
- Local results
- Images
- Shopping results
- Carousels
- People also ask
SERPs have changed dramatically for millions of informational keywords with one or several of these results potentially taking up some of the real estate on page one.
You need to check which rankings are still driving traffic to your site and consider pivoting strategy if your rankings are being affected by AI overviews.
Traffic Value
Ever wondered what the ROI is of your SEO strategy? Then, look no further than the traffic value metric.
This SEO metric measures the monthly monetary value of the organic traffic from your rankings compared to the cost of using paid advertising.
You can work this out by:
- Calculating the monthly organic traffic each keyword generates
- Factoring in its respective ranking position
- Multiplying it by the cost-per-click.
Alternatively, try this traffic value calculator.
Core Web Vitals
Google places a massive emphasis on user experience. That includes the Core Web Vitals metrics that assess page load speed, response time, and visual stability. You can see the core web vitals below, along with Google’s recommended metrics.
- Large Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the loading times of your webpage, specifically the largest element. The better your website loading time, the better the UX.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) assesses the page’s general responsiveness in response to user interactions.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures individual shift scores or the visual stability and whether any elements of the layout shift.
Optimizing your Core Web Vitals can enhance your SEO rankings, ensure your site is mobile-friendly, and give you a competitive advantage.
Page Speed
How fast your site loads can directly impact user engagement and conversions. Research shows that 26 percent of visitors will only wait one to three seconds for a site to load.
Worse still, a slow site may also result in lower rankings.
The good news is that it’s easy to test your page’s loading time. Just enter your URL into a tool like Pingdom:
Ideally, you’re looking for a maximum load time of 1-2.5 seconds. If you find there’s room for improvement, compress and optimize your images, limit redirects, and use caches.
Improving page speed can have some pretty dramatic results.
When Vodafone increased its LCP loading times, sales increased by 8 percent. When Yelp optimized page loading times, conversions got a 15 percent boost.
Domain Authority
Domain authority measures the number of relevant and reputable backlinks your website has. Moz developed this metric to help predict how likely a page is to rank in the SERPs.
Moz scores the domain authority of sites from 1-100.
Naturally, the higher the score, the more likely your site is to rank.
You can check your domain authority on Moz for free. If you want to try improve it, you can:
- Understand everything that contributes to your DA. Moz lists multiple factors, such as the number and quality of links, quality of content, SEO performance, and average website traffic.
- Write quality content. Ensure it’s comprehensive, valuable, actionable, and aimed at your target audience.
- Do a site audit and a backlink audit. Use Ubersuggest to see backlinks, DA scores, and referring domains.
- Build authoritative backlinks. Focus on quality; don’t buy backlinks, as they can be poor quality.
- Write guest posts. This can help you gain authoritative backlinks for your site.
Last but not least, measure your page authority (predictive ranking of a page).
Organic Click-Through Rate
Organic click-through rate is the percentage of searchers who click on your website in the SERPs.. You can calculate your organic click-through rate by dividing your clicks by impressions.
As the following chart shows, click-through rates fluctuate depending on your ranking position.
Unfortunately, the chart above doesn’t take into account results with AI Overviews or other rich results. You may find your click-through rates much lower when Google shows an AI Overview But the only way to know for sure is to calculate the metric.
Even if an AI Overview isn’t present with your query, improving your rankings is the best way to increase your click-through rate. You can also experiment with different page titles and meta descriptions that entice more searchers to click.
Backlinks
The backlink metric measures the number of sites linking to your website
Digital marketers often think of backlinks as one of the most important SEO metrics to track, and with good reason. Having high-quality, relevant links increases your site’s authority and trustworthiness.
In case you aren’t sure, a high-quality backlink is one:
- From an authoritative website (with a high DA score)
- From a site in the same industry as you
- That is naturally placed on the page
- Has natural anchor text
When other authoritative sites are linking to you, this gives you credibility in the “eyes” of the search engines. This is great news for you because this confidence vote from other sites means better visibility and search rankings.
I’ve got a backlink tool to help you find out where you stand.
Once you know where you currently stand, all you’ve got to do is start building backlinks with quality content, guest blogging, blog commenting, and forging relationships with website owners in your niche.
Conversions
Driving traffic to your website is great, but it means nothing if users don’t convert. Conversions don’t have to mean a purchase, though. Other common conversion goals include:
- Signing up for a mailing list
- Downloading an e-book
- Submitting a contact form
In Google Analytics , all actions a user can take are tracked as events. You can track up to 30 of these events, meaning you don’t have to be limited to tracking purchase conversions.
Conversion rates are a key e-commerce KPI that highlight the quality of organic traffic you generate. The higher your conversion rate, the better quality traffic you’re receiving from Google.
The average conversion rate varies between 2-5 percent. This average depends on your sector, average sales cycle, product or service price, and marketing channels.
You can improve your conversion rate by adding more reviews, performing an SEO audit, and localizing or personalizing content.
Mobile Performance
Google uses a mobile-first index to rank websites. So if the mobile version of your site isn’t up to scratch, you’re going to struggle to acquire organic traffic.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to measure your site’s mobile performance using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Just enter your domain, and the tool will provide a range of relevant metrics that you can track and improve over time.
These include ratings from zero to 100 on four factors:
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Best Practices
- SEO
Try to get all of these scores as close to 100 as possible, but don’t worry about a couple of percentage points. Scoring all 90s and then focusing on optimizing other SEO metrics is a much better use of your time than trying to get a perfect score.
SEO Metrics That Aren’t As Important As You Think
While the above performance SEO metrics are essential, others may not be as informative as they seem. Below, I cover the metrics that people may advise you to track but that actually aren’t worth your time.
Bounce Rate (Non-Engaged Sessions)
Bounce rate was previously the percentage of users who visited your site and then left without taking another action. Analytics platforms used to mark a user as bounced if they didn’t visit another page. But that’s no longer the case.
Google Analytics now measures bounce rate by taking the non-engaged sessions and dividing by the total number of sessions.
An engaged session is one that:
- Lasts longer than 10 seconds
- Has at least 1 key event
- If there is no key event, there should be at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.
In other words, users can spend 15 seconds browsing one page of your website and even if they do not visit another page they will not count as a “bounce”
There’s a lot of confusion about bounce rate when it comes to SEO, as Google’s John Mueller says:
“I think there’s a bit of misconception here that we’re looking at things like the analytics bounce rate when it comes to ranking websites, and that’s definitely not the case.”
In other words, too many website owners spend their time optimizing their websites for a lower bounce rate, and their rankings don’t improve.
Don’t be that person.
Although your bounce rate could suggest a problem with user experience, it’s hard to interpret and doesn’t indicate why users leave your site so quickly.
Exit Rate
The exit rate is the percentage of visitors or customers who leave your website after visiting a specific page.
You can calculate the exit rate by dividing the number of exits from a page by the number of visits or interactions.
How important is it, though?
Shorter session durations can indicate a problem with your website. However, it’s not always a definitive sign something is wrong. Some users may find what they need quickly and leave, which is a positive outcome.
Like your bounce rate, your exit rate doesn’t tell you much, so it’s not among the most important SEO benchmarks.
Average Session Duration (ASD
This SEO metric measures the time users spend on a specific page. It gives you an idea of user engagement.
However, like the above bounce rate and exit rate SEO metrics, it doesn’t help you understand user behavior or give you a clear idea of why they’ve left.
Similar to bounce and exit rates, it may indicate that users find what they want quickly and leave.
One thing to keep in mind is that even outside of the ones listed here, there might be some metrics that aren’t valuable to your particular SEO strategy. Rob Tindula, Director of SEO at NP Digital, explains that “all SEO metrics can be valuable for analysis, but certain SEO metrics are not worth tracking or reporting on if they do not have a large impact on your client’s goals. Some of the more mission-critical metrics are things like keyword rankings, organic sessions, or conversions. Too much data can lead to analysis paralysis; focus on the key metrics that matter!”
Tools To Help Track SEO Metrics
You don’t have to track all of these SEO metrics manually. There are plenty of SEO tools that automate the process. Here are four of the best:
Ubersuggest
My free SEO tool Ubersuggest is a great way to track a range of SEO metrics, including your keyword rankings, backlinks, and traffic value.
For example, you can use my backlinks checker and report to get a comprehensive overview of your site’s entire backlink profile. You can also do this for all your competitors so you can see if there are any links you want to target.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that can help you track traffic-related SEO metrics. That includes:
- Organic traffic
- Top organic pages
- Behavior flow
- Conversions
GA4 is a bit more complicated than the previous Universal Analytics, so if you’re new to the platform, make sure you read my guide.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools in the industry. It comes with plenty of tracking features, like Ubersuggest, which can track your keyword rankings and your backlinks.
You can also use the Site Audit feature to monitor your site’s technical performance.
This tool will automatically flag technical issues like slow pages, missing HTML tags, and broken links that could hurt your rankings.
Semrush
Semrush is a comprehensive SEO tool that does a great job of tracking keyword rankings.
Not only does the platform have a position tracker (like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs) that monitors the position of your site for relevant keywords, but it also has a built-in volatility sensor that can highlight changes in Google’s search algorithm.
Choosing the Right SEO Metrics For Your Needs
If all these SEO metrics feel like overload, step back for a moment. You only need to focus on the ones that meet your needs. Here’s how to do that:
Set your goals: What are your main SEO aims? Perhaps you’re working on organic traffic and growing your brand. Then, you’d focus on keyword rankings, organic traffic numbers, and organic visibility.
Tailor your SEO metrics to your sector: If you’re serving an e-commerce audience, you’d look at click-throughs and conversions. In contrast, a regular blog owner may focus on engagement, backlinks, and domain authority instead.
FAQs
What are SEO metrics?
SEO metrics measure various aspects of your website’s performance in search engines. They help you assess the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and make informed decisions to improve your online visibility.
How do I choose the right SEO KPIs?
The first thing to do is avoid focusing on the three metrics I don’t think are worth your time: bounce rate, exit rate, and average session duration.
Next, make sure the metrics you track align with your SEO and business goals. For example, if you already have a strong domain authority, you may not be focused on getting more backlinks. So, it’s probably not worth tracking this metric.
If you have a lot of mobile users, then tracking your page speed and Core Web Vitals will be essential to ensure you provide a great user experience.
How can I track SEO KPIs in relation to other marketing efforts?
The easiest way to track SEO KPIs in relation to your other marketing efforts is by using marketing software. Platforms like Ubersuggest, Google Analytics, and Ahrefs can help you keep track of multiple SEO, PPC, and social media marketing metrics in one place.
How do you use SEO metrics to inform your online strategy?
By measuring SEO performance metrics, you gain actionable insights into how effective your SEO strategy is and find areas of improvement.
The type of SEO metrics you’d measure can vary depending on your sector. For instance, a SaaS business would focus on SaaS metrics like customer lifetime value, average revenue per customer, and monthly recurring revenue.
Conclusion
By tracking and analyzing the right SEO metrics, you can strategize the best ways to improve your website’s performance in the SERPs.
However, before you can do this effectively, draw up a strategy so you’re clear on what you want to achieve. Then you can analyze content marketing metrics like organic traffic or click-through rates to ensure you’re getting more visibility.
Whatever you want to achieve online, remember to keep a keen eye on the most important SEO benchmarks that align with your goals and avoid vanity metrics like bounce rate, exit rate, and average session duration.
That’s how you stay ahead of your SEO game and outperform your competitors.
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