In an online world filled with data, information (overload), insights and ideas, it can be difficult to understand what metrics actually matter when it comes to measuring your online performance.
SEO metrics are indicators that help your business understand whether your SEO is working and whether your SEO company in Warrnambool is worth their monthly fee. Some metrics are essential, most are useful, and some are just vanity metrics that won’t help you make better decisions.
But how do you know which SEO metrics actually matter? The team at WestVic Web have got you covered.
Here are 10 important SEO metrics you should be keeping an eye on:
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Keyword Rankings
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Total Impressions
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Total Clicks
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Organic Traffic
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Referring Domains
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Bounce Rate
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Average Time On Site
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Search Engine Visibility
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Page Speed
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Core Web Vitals
Continue reading to learn more about each of these important SEO metrics. If it all sounds a bit too hard, feel free to get in touch with Warrnambool’s #1 SEO Company, WestVic Web. We’ve worked with some of your favourite big name brands and local businesses and would to help you too!
Keyword Rankings
Search engine optimisation and keyword rankings go hand-in-hand. After all, a well executed SEO strategy, delivers improved organic rankings in Google for keywords related to your business, service or product.
The more relevant a search term is to your business, combined with a significant search volume (the number of potential customers searching on Google every month), the more important it is for your business to rank for it.
Tracking your keyword rankings allows you to monitor your SEO performance for your most important keywords over time. The SEO team at WestVic Web provide monthly keyword ranking reports for our clients, but there’s also a number of paid tools you can use to keep an eye on keyword rankings if you’d prefer to do your own SEO:
If you’re running a tight budget, you can always manually check Google rankings in an incognito browser or use Google Search Console, which is a free tool provided by Google. It helps you track your site’s search performance and statistics on how your website is performing in search results.
Total Impressions
Impressions is the number of times a potential customer has seen your website on the search engine results page. The most common place impressions are measured is Google Search Console. The experts at Google have written about these exact metrics via a detailed guide.
Impressions are an important SEO metric because they provide a simple representation of how many people are seeing your website when searching the web for the products or services your business provides. Calculating the number of organic impressions your website generates is also one of the simplest ways to determine if you’re targeting the right SEO keywords and more importantly, implementing proper SEO to rank highly for them.
Total Clicks
It goes without saying, impressions don’t deliver website traffic, clicks do! At the end of the day, the point of SEO is to get more traffic from Google and that’s exactly what clicks will deliver.
“Total Clicks” should be your SEO north star. If that number is going up, your SEO efforts are working
But how do I see how much traffic Google is sending me? Easy! Click on “Total Clicks” in Google Search Console.
TAKE MY WEBSITE TO PAGE #1
Organic Traffic
As we’ve previously mentioned: SEO Gets You Serious Traffic! Organic traffic represents all website users who performed a search on Google and clicked through to your website via one of the organic links (not an ad). If your SEO is performing as it should, your organic traffic should be steadily improving over time.
The best part about organic traffic is: it’s FREE! If your website is well optimised and ranking prominently for relevant keywords related to your business, you should receive a steady stream of website visitors for the foreseeable future.
With that said, it does take time and effort to rank higher in Google and it won’t happen over night. However, when you’re sitting on top of Google for your chosen keywords you can rest easy, knowing you don’t have to pay for any of those clicks!
The easiest way to check your organic traffic is to ensure Google Analytics is installed on your website. It can be a little tricky to setup, so feel free to contact WestVic Web if you need some help!
Referring Domains
Referring domains are websites that link to your website and are another crucial aspect of an SEO campaign.
Websites that link to yours share some of their “SEO value” with your own website, essentially telling Google, “hey this website has some great information, you should check it out”.
You want to make sure you’re getting more referring domains over time, as this is likely to lead to more organic search traffic. So an upward trend in referring domains is an indication that your link building, PR, and branding efforts are on the right track.
The best tool for tracking referring domains is:
If you don’t feel like paying for another tool, give us a shout and we can tell you how your website is performing.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a controversial SEO metric to include on this list, as it doesn’t always tell the full story of website performance.
Bounce rate can be defined as the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
With this in mind, consider a website visitor who clicks through to your website. They might not find the information they’re looking for, or the website takes too long to load, so they “bounce” back to the results page. That would be considered a bad user experience, resulting in a high bounce rate and something that should be fixed!
On the other hand, if a website visitor comes to your site, finds exactly what they’re looking for (your phone number, address or dinner menu) and then “bounces” back to Google, that’s not a bad bounce and doesn’t necessarily require your attention.
This why the team at Warrnambool’s #1 SEO Company recommend looking at bounce rate and average session duration together, rather than in isolation, to ensure you’re gaining a valuable insight.
AVERAGE TIME ON SITE
Average session duration or time on site is another “controversial SEO metric” that should not be viewed in isolation.
Generally speaking a higher average time on site suggests an engaged website visitor. Someone who is reading all your content, browsing images and videos and simply having a great user experience.
However, this doesn’t exactly tell the full story. Is your average time on site high because your content is difficult to read, pages are hard to navigate or the interactive elements take forever to load?
Average time on site, certainly provides a clue to user engagement, but don’t just look at a few online minutes as a great result. Consider why your users are spending so much time online.
YES! I WANT MORE TRAFFIC
Search Engine Visibility
Search engine visibility (also known as “search visibility” or “SEO visibility”) is the share of traffic that a website receives from its rankings in the organic search results.
This SEO metric is a little trickier than most to calculate, but here goes:
Your Search Engine Visibility score is calculated by:
- Taking all of your rankings for all of your keywords.
- Applying an estimated click-through-rate (CTR) based on each ranking position. The CTR calculation ensures that higher ranking keywords are appropriately weighted in the score.
- Adding all of your CTRs and dividing by the number of keywords you’re tracking in that Campaign, giving you a single metric of 0% -100%, calculated to 2 decimal points.
All things considered search engine visibility is the holy-grail of SEO metrics and provides an overarching, macro level view of your SEO performance.
Page Speed
Are you wondering why is my website so slow? If so, you’ve stumbled across another important SEO metric you should be paying close attention to.
Patience is a virtue, but when it comes to web surfing, fast website loading is very important to every visitor. The load speed has a huge impact on the web traffic, conversions and ultimately on sales. Web page load affects both SEO and user experience.
There are a number of awesome tools you can use to test you website speed and uncover opportunities to improve load time:
Why not try these free website speed tools to analyse the load speed of your websites, and learn how to make them faster. Or speak to Warrnambool’s web design experts at WestVic Web who can help with your need for speed!
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of three technical SEO metrics related to your website speed and user experience. Here’s what the SEO metrics are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – the single largest visible element loaded in the viewport.
- First Input Delay (FID) – the time from when a user interacts with your page until the page can respond.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – how elements move around or how stable the page layout is.
This reflects Google’s effort to rank webpages that offer a great user experience which entails good loading speed and smooth interactivity. Simple yeah?
CWV is a crucial SEO ranking factor. Google wants to provide the best experience to its users, so your website must do the same!
Understanding what SEO metrics to look at and how to interpret it is an often overlooked part of a successful search engine optimisation strategy (or any other marketing activity). Reporting and proving the value of our SEO efforts is an important part of our jobs here at WestVic Web. If it all sounds a bit too hard, why not let us help your business unpack the “why” behind each of those numbers.
