Measuring SEO metrics is crucial to demonstrate the worth of your efforts and optimizations.
It is the cornerstone of securing funds from executives and existing clients, acquiring new ones, justifying SEO expenditure, and ensuring the satisfaction of your current clients.
With a vast range of SEO platforms and specific solutions available, it is vital to measure the most important enterprise-level metrics to evaluate SEO performance and guarantee that you are meeting business objectives and targets.
ROI
The COVID pandemic has brought significant changes to our world.
As a result, many brands are cautious about their marketing expenses and are closely monitoring their spending.
To justify your presence, it is crucial to calculate the ROI of SEO. This process starts by aligning with business objectives. For instance, if you are a printer eCommerce brand aiming for a 30% YoY growth, you must devise a strategy that aligns with this goal.
To prove ROI, you will require specific information depending on how your client generates revenue, such as eCommerce or lead generation. These details may include:
- Average order value
- Conversion rates
- Current rankings and traffic
- SEO expenditure
ROI = (Organic Traffic * Conversion Rate * Avg Order Value) / Cost of SEO
Calculate Keyword Value Equation For Ecommerce Website
Revenue = Search Volume * Ranking Position Click-Through-Rate * Conversion Rate * Avg Order Value
Equation For Lead Generation Website
Revenue = Search Volume * Ranking Position Click-Through-Rate * Conversion Rate * Lead-to-Customer Rate * Customer LTV
Brand Visibility Versus Non-Brand Visibility
Tracking brand vs. non-brand visibility and conversions is another crucial metric that can be monitored if your SEO platform offers a keyword-level performance tracking solution.
Most websites receive significant traffic and conversions from branded keywords.
By showing incremental growth in branded keywords and helping your client rank number one for previously untapped keywords, you can increase revenue, as branded keywords typically indicate greater purchase intent.
Additionally, monitoring increases in non-brand keywords driving traffic can demonstrate the effectiveness of your SEO strategies, particularly if you are generating incremental sales and revenue for your clients.
Backlinks and Referring Domains
Having high-quality backlinks from relevant sites is still an important ranking factor.
It’s not about the number of backlinks to your site, but the quality and relevance of those sites linking to your page.
For example, if Nike receives links from reputable sites related to shoes, sneakers, and apparel, it will boost their rankings since relevance and quality are crucial. Monitoring referring domains is also important, as getting high-quality links from various relevant websites can positively impact search engine rankings.
Rankings
It is essential to monitor both your non-branded and branded search engine rankings to identify the keywords that drive qualified traffic and conversions to your website.
By doing so, you can attain your organic search objectives and determine what impacts your performance.
The primary goal of SEO is to draw qualified traffic that converts into customers.
If your rankings decrease significantly for non-branded and branded keywords that assist your site in meeting key performance indicators (KPIs), it could imply that your site had a manual action taken against it, lost some links, has a technical problem, or your content does not meet the user’s intent.
Indexed Pages
Another important measure to keep track of is the number of indexed pages.
If you add content to your blog or new category pages and it does not get indexed by Google, do you know what happens?
You won’t rank for any keywords on those pages because the content hasn’t been indexed and crawled.
Always ensure that your content is indexed by submitting new pages in your HTML and XML sitemaps, including links from your site navigation, and/or submitting content to be indexed through Google Search Console.
Always make sure to clean up any duplicated pages and remove any thin or outdated content.
Google values fresh content, but duplicate, outdated, or irrelevant content can be an obstacle.
Impressions & CTR
Impressions refer to the number of times your URLs are displayed in search results that a user views, and this does not include paid Google Ads search impressions.
If your impressions increase, it may suggest that Google considers your content to be pertinent to the user’s search query.
When the URL is clicked, it will lead to more traffic to your website, which can result in increased traffic, sales, and conversions.
Page Speed & Core Web Vitals
Ensuring that pages load as quickly as possible (in under three seconds), and contain content that promptly satisfies the user’s information needs, provides the best user experience.
Numerous studies have shown that a good page load time can have a positive impact on conversions.
Another essential SEO metric to consider is Core Web Vitals, which focuses on user experience, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, measured by:
- Largest contentful paint (LCP).
- First input delay (FID).
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS).
Core Web Vitals are a part of a broader set of Page Experience metrics, utilized to enhance the overall web user experience as a ranking signal. Pages with “Good” vitals are already performing well in search.
Crawl Errors
Crawl errors arise when a search engine attempts to access a webpage on your website but fails to do so successfully with a 200-response code.
It is crucial to monitor crawl errors to ensure that Google can discover, index, crawl, and rank your content.
Crawl errors may occur due to a webpage being blocked via robots or noindex, no longer existing, or redirecting to an alternative page.
If there is a substantial rise in crawl errors, Google may reduce your search engine visibility. It is important to conduct consistent crawls and review Google Search Console for crawl errors.
Organic Traffic
Monitoring organic traffic is a crucial metric to monitor as it indicates whether your SEO efforts are effective and attracting more relevant users to your client’s website on a monthly and yearly basis.
Clients usually prefer to see month-on-month or quarter-on-quarter traffic growth. However, year-on-year comparisons provide a more accurate assessment as seasonal businesses may experience predictable increases and decreases during specific seasons.
The more qualified traffic you can generate from organic search on both mobile and desktop, the higher the chances of improving conversions and revenue, provided you offer a good user experience across the fragmented user journey.
Organic Conversions
Ultimately, the goal of SEO is to attract relevant traffic that can be converted into customers.
When your conversion rates rise, it is a clear indication that your organic search strategy is effective, and your SEO tactics are generating high-quality traffic to your website, resulting in increased sales, leads, or downloads. This indicates the success of your SEO efforts.
Organic Landing Page Metrics
Instead of assessing SEO performance at the keyword level, it is also useful to evaluate it at the landing page level.
By monitoring organic sessions and other conversion metrics on analytics platforms such as GA, you can gain insights into how each page on your website performs over time, identify top-performing pages, and uncover gaps and opportunities for improvement.
If certain pages are underperforming, it is essential to review your SEO strategy and analyze why they are not performing as well as other high-performing pages on the site.
Consider whether you are targeting the right keywords or if the page has slow loading times or broken links.
Top Exit Pages
The objective of a landing page is to help users find what they are seeking and prompt them to convert, such as making a purchase or downloading a brochure.
However, users may struggle to locate what they need, causing them to explore other landing pages before leaving without converting.
Examining your top exit pages can highlight which pages are underperforming and where users tend to exit.
If analytics reveal that a significant number of users (for example, 60%) are leaving from a particular page that should be generating conversions, it is necessary to reassess the page and investigate the root cause of the problem.
New vs. Returning Visitors
Monitoring the ratio of new and returning visitors is a valuable metric to assess.
If you notice a significant number of returning visitors but low conversion rates, it may be necessary to investigate your exit pages to determine what is hindering users from completing a purchase.
An effective SEO strategy should target a relevant audience and meet their information needs throughout the entire user journey, thereby encouraging them to return to your website.
Home Depot provides an excellent example of this by offering videos and other DIY content that assist users in diagnosing and solving problems.
SEO Metrics of Competitors
It is essential to keep an eye on your competitors to gain insights into the type of content they are producing, which landing pages are achieving better results, where they are outperforming you in terms of market share and ranking, and where they are obtaining links from.
Regularly monitoring your competitors’ backlinks can help identify new opportunities to improve your client’s website, and monitoring their visibility can assist in identifying areas of relevance. It is crucial to focus on identifying content gaps and exploring new strategies and tactics to outperform your competitors.
Content Score
Creating high-quality content that aligns with user intent, covers relevant topics, and is supported by high-quality links is crucial to succeed in the competitive SERPs of today.
Various tools, such as ClearScope, Market Muse, and Content Fusion by SEO Clarity, can evaluate content against a defined “theme,” typically a head term, and provide a score on a 100-point scale. This score is relative to other content pieces that also support the same target theme.
By using such tools, SEO professionals can identify common text-based elements to incorporate into their content to enhance its relevance to the target theme. Additionally, SEO tactics such as structured data markup can further optimise content for search engines.
Share Of Voice
Monitoring your share of voice is crucial to determine how your brand compares to your main competitors in terms of occupying significant search space.
It offers valuable insights into your competitors’ strategies, revealing who you are competing against for each keyword and keyword group across various business lines and locations.
It’s essential to remember that your competitors may not always be who you assume they are.
Evaluating crucial metrics from organic search is crucial to identifying areas for enhancement that can boost traffic, conversions, and search engine rankings, thereby helping to achieve business goals, objectives, and ROI.
By leveraging these metrics, you can develop a compelling narrative for stakeholders that highlights the significance of SEO. You can also take inspiration from excellent SEO data visualisations to create your own engaging reports.
However, it is essential to avoid typical reporting errors made by enterprises.
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