Search engine optimisation or SEO is a core function of digital marketing services and marketing teams track and use SEO metrics to measure the performance of their website for organic search results.
However, as important as it is to track SEO metrics and observe changes that occur month over month, it is also important to know which SEO metrics you should measure.
These are twelve important metrics that determine top performing pages, top converting keywords, and areas of the website that should be optimised for search.
- Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is one of the key metrics tracked by a digital marketing agency in Sri Lanka as it gives the marketing team an idea of the traffic earned from appearing in the search engine results pages or SERPS without having to pay for the placement.
This metric can be tracked by using Google Analytics.
- Organic Conversions
Organic traffic is a metric that tells you how many people visited the website, but organic conversions look at how many of those visits turned into sales. When tracking this metric, internet marketing services will set up a goal or conversion events in Google Analytics. These goals can include making a purchase, email signups, phone calls, form submissions and button clicks.
- Keyword Rankings
Another important metric tracked by digital marketing services is keyword rankings. Various keyword tracking tools like SEMrush and SERanking can be used to calculate the total number of keywords for which your site ranks in Google.
The data you gather in the form of keyword rankings can be used in various ways to improve your SEO and social media marketing strategy.
- Local Visibility
A digital marketing company like Ontomatrix may also track local visibility, which is extremely important to teams managing local SEO campaigns. This metric makes it easier to ensure your organic traffic is coming from the right audience and tools like Google Maps Rankings (Agency Analytics), Google My Business Insights (GMB), and Session Location (Google Analytics) can be used in this regard.
- Organic Landing Page Metrics
Tracking metrics across your website is useful when understanding the overall performance of the website and SEO and content marketing strategies implemented. However, marketing teams must also measure the performance of specific landing pages and the traffic they attract.
- Page Speed
A digital marketing agency in Sri Lanka like Ontomatrix will also monitor page speed and this is a useful SEO metric to track when monitoring individual pages on a website. Knowing how fast the content on each page loads will help you make changes to your SEO strategy to enhance user experience and loading speeds if necessary.
Tools that can be used to track this metric include Google Pages Speed Insight and GT Metrix.
- Top Exit Pages
The last pages a person visits before leaving a website are known as exit pages. Tracking your top exit pages may give you a better idea of where your content marketing strategies are lacking. Your top exit pages are the reason people lose interest in your site and go elsewhere, which means that you should track these pages and improve your internet marketing services to ensure your content keeps visitors interested.
- Engagement Metrics
Ontomatrix and any other digital marketing agency in Sri Lanka will carefully track engagement metrics. There are three key metrics in this regard.
Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your website without clicking on any links. In other words, these are visitors who hit the ‘back’ button on the browser. This metric is expressed as a percentage.
Time on site is another metric that is important and this is the average amount of time visitors spend on your website.
The third engagement metric to track is pages per visit, which looks at the number of pages a user visits before leaving the site.
- Organic Click-Through Rate
Organic click-through rate or CTR is the average percentage of people who click on one of your links after seeing it in the search results. Digital marketing services use tools and features like the Search Analytics report by Google Search Console to track this metric.
- New Versus Returning Visitors
Attracting visitors to the website is important, but so is getting them to return to the website. This metric can indicate if you are targeting the right traffic and meeting their requirements with your content marketing strategies.
- Crawl Errors
Important digital and social media marketing metrics to track include crawl errors, which should be addressed right away. A tool you can use to track crawl errors is Google Search Console, which, by default, provides you with site-wide errors. However, you can use filters to view errors by segment.
- Competitor Metrics
There is no doubt that you should track and measure your own SEO strategies and performance. However, any digital marketing company would also recommend tracking your competition. This will allow you to identify new opportunities and compare total backlinks.