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Top SEO KPIs and Metrics You Need to Keep an Eye On

You’ve set up your SEO campaign. You know what search queries you want to target, as well as your business goals. You’ve started implementing SEO tactics in your day-to-day marketing activities. You’ve got content ready to go, and have even started promoting it. 

But how are you actually doing? Are you hitting your KPI’s? Is traffic going up? How do you measure the effect of your website on business decision-makers and ultimate customers? 

The answer is in knowing what metrics actually matter to make a difference for your business, KPIs or called Key Performance Indicators. Here are some of the most important things you need to keep an eye on.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to the kind of traffic your website gets from search engines. It is most commonly measured by using the Google Analytics metric called “organic traffic,” because it comes from the search engine “naturally,” not paid for.

Tracking organic traffic is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation. In fact, without tracking your organic traffic, you cannot determine if your digital marketing efforts were successful or not.

When you’re aware of traffic coming to your blog or website from organic search, you can determine if it’s the traffic you want and then make decisions based on the results. This allows you to improve your incoming traffic over time by rewarding what works and eliminating what doesn’t work.

Google Analytics is one of the best ways to track your organic traffic. It’s a completely free tool that installs easily on your website. You can use it to track not only the amount of traffic coming to your site, but also how people interact with it. The data that you’ll gather from using Google Analytics can help you make much smarter business decisions in the future.

Keyword Rankings

People search for keywords online to find relevant products, services and information. Keyword rankings show you how many people your content is reaching. Tracking these keywords can help you improve traffic flows to certain pages on your website, and improve user experience on your site.

It’s also important to track keyword rankings so you can keep tabs on your overall organic traffic and make data-driven decisions. If you’re unaware of your keywords rankings, it can be difficult to determine what content needs to be updated, adjusted, or even created in the first place.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz, and SEMrush to monitor your rankings on a huge amount of keywords. They’ll provide you with a lot of actionable information that can help you improve overall SEO performance.

Conversions

A conversion is an action you want people to do on your website and should be defined before you start your digital marketing campaign.

As an online entrepreneur, you want to know the ROI of all your efforts, and one of the most important metrics to measure is conversions. 

In order to know if you’re moving in the right direction, or whether a particular strategy works, you need to start tracking your conversions. You need a funnel that’s measurable and trackable. This can either be a landing page, an opt-in form, or an action on your website such as a purchase.

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are a powerful combination for tracking conversions. With the help of GTM, we can even create “if, then” style rules to trigger our analytics actions when needed. These rules make it easy to track multiple goals with varying conditions (by location, date, etc.).

Average Session Duration

Average session duration is the amount of time a user actively interacts with your website per visit, and it is a metric used by Google Analytics to track the length of each user’s usage. 

When properly tracked, average session duration gives you an understanding of how much time users spend on your site as opposed to just how many visits they generate. 

You can dig deeper and analyse the Average Session of specific pages. By doing this, you can identify which of your services pages or blog posts resonated with your audience. Armed with this data, you can create content that’s even more engaging than before.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your website after landing on a single page. It is one of the key metrics used in Google Analytics. 

If your website’s bounce rate is high, it means that most visitors are not engaging with your content. There’s a number of possible culprits to high bounce rates: the content is unhelpful, outdated, or the landing page is not optimised for the visitor.

Backlinks

A backlink is a hyperlink from another website to yours. Backlinks point to your website and are an indication of your popularity and authority in the eyes of search engines.

All backlinks are not created equal. Some will provide more value to your website than others. A good example is getting a link from CNN on their homepage compared to getting a link from a forum.

The number of backlinks to a website is one of the key factors that search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing use to rank websites. This makes it important to know the quality of your backlink profile.

SEMRush is a great tool for analysing your website’s backlink profile as well as your competitors. There are times you’ll stumble upon a competitor doing better than you with less effort or traffic going to their site.

This could be a result of some shady link building tactics that are hard to spot, but SEMRush makes things easier for you by allowing you to analyse backlinks.

If you would like more information on tracking your website performance – give us a call on 02 82110668, email us on info@cornerstone-digital.com.au or complete our online enquiry form.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.