Now that you have implemented SEO initiatives for a few months, it’s time to see if you’re seeing some positive results. One of the most effective ways to assess your SEO performance is by using metrics to quantify your SEO results. Here are four simple and useful SEO metrics small businesses can use.
1. Average Search Ranking
One of the most critical SEO metrics that you should keep track of is your website’s search ranking for a particular set of keyword phrases. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency and you have created a “Vancouver SEO”, “Toronto SEO” or “Google Analytics 4 (GA4) consulting service” landing page, you want to keep track of your landing page’s search ranking for search queries related to “Vancouver SEO”, “Toronto SEO” or “Google Analytics 4 consulting”.
There are different tools you can use to track your website’s search ranking for specific search terms. We typically use Google Search Console and SEMRush. Google Search Console is a free, Google-powered webmaster tool that provides data on your website, such as your search ranking for different search queries, reliability issues, and more. SEMRush is a freemium SEO tool that provides SEO data such as a list of websites that appear on search results for a specific search term, and a website’s search rankings for different keywords.
2. Conversion Rate
In addition to increasing your website’s search ranking and gaining more website traffic, you want to generate leads or sales from the organic traffic. One way of assessing the quality of your organic traffic is by looking at your conversion rate, which is the percentage of organic traffic converted on your website. A conversion could be a form submission, phone call, or online purchase. If you’re bringing a ton of organic traffic to your website but the conversion rate is minimal, you can look for optimization opportunities to improve your landing page, quality of your organic traffic, or keywords you’re optimizing for. If you’re bringing a lot of organic traffic but very few visitors are converting, your landing page may need improvement, or your keywords may be unrelated, bringing in irrelevant visitors. Looking at your organic traffic conversion rate is a good first step of qualifying your organic traffic and SEO efforts.
3. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who land on a webpage and leave (or bounce) the page without visiting a second page. For example, if 100 visitors land on your homepage and 60 of them leave your website without visiting a second page, your website’s bounce rate is 60%.
Bounce rate is a useful metric for assessing the quality of your website traffic and your website content. If the bounce rate of your organic traffic is significantly higher than your other traffic sources, it is worthwhile to dig in and identify potential problems with your SEO efforts and traffic sources. For example, you can see which landing pages your organic visitors are predominantly landing on to see if there is anything that needs to be adjusted to improve the bounce rate.
