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SEO metrics to track on Google Analytics
Posted by Stuart Walters on July 07, 2019
Obviously, your organic traffic is a good place to start, but there are multiple other things that you need to track in order to determine the success of your SEO strategy. We’ve put together the ultimate list of important SEO metrics to track to help you keep up to date with optimising your SEO strategy.
The majority of these metrics can be measured on free tools like Google Analytics but they can also be measured an compared on various other SEO tools like SEMrush. We like to use various tools to get an overall understanding of how our website is performing from the perspective of different platforms. This is because, some metrics such as ‘domain authority’ are measured in different ways depending on the platform you are using.
We would also like to point out the importance of using Google Search Console when looking at measuring your SEO success. Google Search Console allows you to clearly see various trends and referrals on your website and is therefore very beneficial.
So, what metrics do you need to measure?
Keyword rankings
It’s important to look at where you’re ranking for your keywords. You can use tools such as Google Search Console or SEMrush to determine the success of individual keywords. This can be particularly useful if you’re looking to improve the rankings of certain pages on your website.
Organic traffic
Let’s start with the most obvious, organic traffic. In order to determine how successful your SEO strategy is you need to determine how much organic traffic your website is getting. This is the ultimate indicator.
Organic click-through-rate
Another similar metric you might want to keep track of is your CTR. This is slightly different from your organic traffic and can help determine how good your metadescriptions and SEO titles are. It tells you how many people that were shown your website on their search results actually clicked through to your website.
Organic conversions
If you’re getting the traffic you want to also be getting the conversions. This is a great way of determining whether your SEO is getting you any business or not. Are people filling in your contact forms from finding you organically? Or are you getting high bounce rates.
Bounce rates
Your bounce rate is the number of people who left you website without going anywhere else or doing anything else on the page the arrived at. This is important to measure for SEO because it helps search engines determine whether your content is useful to consumers or not. If people leave immediately and don’t click anywhere else it suggests that you aren’t relevant to that person.
Time spent on page
This leads us on to another important metric to be measuring: time spent on page. If people are spending a few seconds on a blog that is 1000 words long they aren’t reading it. This suggests that your content is no relevant and does not keep people on the page. It also can help you determine which content is more successful than others. Traffic can only tell you so much, you also want to know what happens when people reach that page.
Top exit pages
Another metric that can help you determine which content is the most successful is top exit pages. By determining which pages are the pages that people exit most frequently you can find out which bits of content you might need to improve. Obviously, this depends on the purpose of that page, if it’s a ‘thank you for your information’ page then it doesn’t really matter, but if it’s your home page? You might want to change that content up a bit.
Pages per visit
Pages per visit is another helpful metric for determining whether your content is good or not. If people visit multiple pages on your site you know that they are interested in what you have to say. This coupled with time spent on page can be useful to determining whether or not your content is successful or not.
Number of backlinks
You also need to be looking at the number of links you have back to your site. These are really important because they tell search engines that you’re trustworthy and other people think your content is worth linking to for whatever reason.
Domain authority
The number of backlinks you have increases the number of backlinks you have. Your domain authority is an important factor for helping determine how trustworthy your site is and consequently how much search engines want to show your website to other pages.
Average page load time
Another important factor to keep track of is how long your pages are taking to load. If your pages take too long to load then people are much more likely to leave your site before reading anything. In fact, page speed is one of the biggest factors that can affect your SEO.
Setting your goals
When determining your goals for different metrics for your SEO strategy, it’s important to be realistic and set achievable goals.
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