Tracking SEO metrics that matter

Every SEO-related tactic or optimisation you put in place is done to grow your business online.

If you sell custom branded ironing board covers (exciting!), you want your website to show up at the top of organic results when anyone types in “custom branded ironing board cover”. And SEO can help make that happen.

When it comes to measuring the success of an SEO campaign, many SEO’s talk a lot about keyword rankings. And a lot of clients are fixated on getting the coveted number 1 spot.

So, are keyword ranking positions the best measurement you can use to track the success, effectiveness, and impact of your SEO campaign?

Not quite.

SEO: How to measure campaign success

There are a few different metrics that you should be tracking over time to build up a fuller picture of how your SEO is working.

Those include:

• Keyword rankings
• Organic traffic
• Behaviour metrics
• Conversions

Keyword rankings

Ok, so yes, you should keep an eye on keyword rankings as they are a big indicator of how well your site is optimised for your chosen keywords. But make sure you’re targeting the most relevant and useful keywords for your business!

I use Mangools to track keywords for my clients but there are loads of ranking tools out there.

Organic traffic

A huge aim of SEO is to bring organic traffic to your site so you need to monitor how much of this traffic your site is getting and how it is changing over time. Ideally, you are looking for organic traffic to increase month-on-month

Compare traffic figures to the previous month and the previous year as well as how it’s changed over the last year.

You can find this information in the Source/Medium report in Google Analytics under Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Filter for “google/organic” traffic and use the date field in the top right to compare.

Behaviour metrics

Behaviour metrics — like those listed below — can help tell you how people are interacting with your site.

• Pages per session
• Time spent on site
• Bounce rate

The bounce rate decreasing, the pages per session going up, and the average time spent on site increasing all indicate that your site is getting more quality and relevant organic traffic.

Again, you can find this data in your Google Analytics dashboard.

Conversions

And of course, the ultimate aim is to get sales!

So check how the number of conversions and the conversion rate from organic traffic is changing over time.

Measuring & tracking your SEO success

To help you keep track of any SEO-related changes you make that could impact your data, use annotations to mark important dates in Google Analytics. These will help provide context and help you see what changes have had a direct impact on your reports.

Looking at a range of metrics and measuring how the data changes over time will help give you a fuller picture of how your SEO efforts are paying off.

Originally published at https://jadegillham.co.uk