Over 60% of marketers believe that SEO is the most important aspect of digital marketing.
Due to changes made by Google, the work that goes into SEO is evolving every year. Staying up to date with what SEO metrics are most important requires time and research. It isn’t always easy to find the time or the information that you need.
We will save you some time and talk about the 7 most important metrics in SEO for 2023.
Terminology
When discussing metrics, you’ll often hear the term “KPI” used. This stands for key performance indicators. These indicators get tracked by Google Analytics and the Google Search Console.
1. New Users
Google tracks how many users that visit a site are new to that site. It does this by recording how many visitors are new and don’t have a cookie for that website. This is one of the most important SEO performance metrics to track if you are in the middle of a marketing campaign.
The reason this KPI is so important is that it tracks how much new traffic is being generated. If you notice this number is not going up or is low, you need to change your SEO strategy. Bringing in new users is a clear sign that your efforts are paying off and generating new leads.
2. Organic Sessions
The reason why this KPI is so important is that it indicates who found you organically. This would mean who used a search engine and ended up on your page. You can also track which search engine they came from.
This is an SEO KPI since the purpose of SEO is to drive organic traffic. Google Analytics is a great tool to use when keeping track of organic sessions. You can also develop an over-time report showing the increase or decrease of organic traffic.
This shouldn’t get confused with traffic that comes from pay-for-click ads or other avenues. This will show you how well your website is ranking and if it is drawing in users.
3. Bounce Rate
When it comes to SEO tracking metrics, bounce rate is one to pay attention to. This KPI measures the number of people who visit your site but do not interact with it. This could be someone who arrives at a landing page and then leaves.
The information you can draw from this has a lot to do with technical SEO. Make sure that your website is encouraging visitors to interact. Having good content and quick loading times are essential to keeping the bounce rate low.
A low bounce rate is a sign that there is a problem with your website. This could be a technical issue, such as slow load times, or a content issue. You might be targeting the wrong audience.
4. Conversion Rate
Conversation rate is one of the metrics for SEO that judges success. This is the number of people who either make a purchase or fulfill some other goal you have set up. This SEO metric is the entire point of the marketing campaign and SEO work.
Not only does this metric reveal if you’re getting qualified traffic, but it can also help show any weaknesses. The data doesn’t lie. If there’s a problem with your site, your conversation rate will remain low.
The goal of SEO is not to increase random traffic to a website. The goal is to increase traffic amongst key groups who are more likely to convert. Conversion rate has been a key KPI since the start of analytics and digital marketing.
5. Goals
This category will help you set and achieve the objectives that you want. If you’re an e-commerce website, this section could be renamed “revenue”. For those that aren’t in e-commerce, you are responsible for setting up your own goals.
You can set up goals in your SEO reporting metrics. This will help you identify whether you are achieving what you set out to. These goals can be tied to many different KPIs, which is handy if you’re wanting broad results.
You can also specialize the goals to be as specific as you want. This way, you can isolate individual aspects of your marketing strategy and test for success. Whether revenue or not, knowing how well your SEO efforts are going is key to making wise investments in marketing.
6. Average Duration
This is known as session duration, and this KPI helps indicate how engaged your visitors are. You can also look at how many pages they visit when they are on your site. This will help you determine if your content is good and aimed at the right customers.
The more engaging your content, the longer someone will stay and interact with it. The more interaction you have with a customer, the more chance they will become a conversion. Your goal should be to keep them engaged for as long as possible with meaningful content.
7. Position Ranking
The ultimate KPI to watch, positional ranking, can reveal a lot about what is going on with your website. It is important to track position rankings so that you can react to new opportunities. This data will come in at both the page and the keywords level. Both are important.
If a page or keyword is getting a lot of impressions, but you’re not having click-throughs, you know something is wrong. It could be something as simple as the title of the page or the meta description. Correcting this flaw will immediately help improve the performance of your site.
SEO Metrics
There are free and paid services that revolve around delivering metrics to your business. You can research and experiment with the ones that work best for you. Google is famous for having high-quality tools that are free to use.
If you want to take your SEO to the next level, you can hire a professional digital marketing agency. They will understand how to track SEO metrics and what to do to improve them.
If you want to take your business to the next level, contact us.
