There are several ways to measure the success of your SEO campaigns, but closely monitoring key metrics is certainly one of the most informative. Various free tools are available to track these all-important metrics, such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, but understanding which metrics you should focus on is key to building a comprehensive overview of your SEO efforts.
Organic traffic
Understanding the levels of traffic that your website receives organically from search engine results pages – that is, without paying for positions within key search terms – is essential. Putting a lot of effort into SEO and ranking well for key terms within your niche will quickly grow your organic traffic levels and will provide you with a solid understanding of how well your current SEO approach is performing.
There are two important subsections to this metric: the landing page and the location. You might find that some of your pages are ranking highly, whereas others aren’t performing quite as well. This will tell you where you need to focus your efforts, which will ultimately help you to boost any underperforming pages and improve the overall visibility of your website.
Monitoring your organic traffic by location will also help you to see where your main audience are situated. You might discover that you have an unexpectedly large audience in an overseas territory, and expanding your business into this marketplace might be one of the best decisions that you will ever make.
Organic bounce rate
The organic bounce rate will tell you how many people have left your website without looking at any pages other than their initial landing page. Ideally, this should only be a low percentage of viewers but if you do find that you have a high bounce rate, you should try and see it as an opportunity rather than a problem.
Again, monitoring your organic bounce rate by landing page will be particularly illuminating. Your landing pages should encourage your audience to explore and engage with the rest of your content, but a high bounce rate will tell you that something needs addressing. On the one hand, a high organic bounce rate may mean that your audience were able to quickly locate the information that they were looking for, but on the other hand, it could indicate that your content didn’t meet their expectations. There will be solutions for each scenario, but understanding the precise issue is key to implementing the most effective refinements.
Organic conversion rate
Securing high-quality traffic to your website is essential, but you also need to understand how many visitors you are successfully converting into customers. This will help you to form a clear picture of how appealing your online presence is, which will illuminate both what you should do more of and what requires some adjustment.
Monitoring your organic conversion rate by landing page should be a high priority, as this is precisely where many conversion opportunities are won or lost. It is also worth monitoring by location because you might find that different approaches are considerably more or less successful in different areas. These metrics will help you focus your SEO and marketing efforts, enabling you to refine your strategy and effectively target more sections of your intended audience.