The pioneers of the internet (ARPAnet in the ‘60s) never imagined there would be entities called search engines that would become the gatekeepers of the world wide web? Unless you live under a rock, you must know that the first landing dock for most people going online is the search engines. Google takes up 92.47% of that dock’s real estate, followed at a far distance by Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo.
In other words, if you are not playing nice by the search engine rules (read Google rules), you might as well close up shop. Your fancy website design and high-quality products will be useless if they’re not playing nice by the Google SEO rule book.
Critical SEO KPIs to Always Observe
This article will delve into the vital SEO (Search Engine Optimization) metrics. If you master these key performance indicators (KPIs), you will be hitting home runs frequently. They are as follows:
1. Keyword Ranking
A consumer uses specific keywords related to a particular product when searching for information on the product online. As a business, you must make an informed decision in listing all of the most relevant keywords a consumer might use when searching online for your products.
You don’t need to guess and start shooting blindly. There are insightful tools that do the brain-exhausting work of identifying these keywords. They include Google Search Console and SEMrush.
2. Backlinks
When another website links to your website, we call it a backlink. The more backlinks you get, the higher your site’s ratings in the search engines’ eyes. Although, not all backlinks are equal; the more authoritative the website, the higher the rating.
Linkody is a great tool to help you identify all the websites linking back to your site. It also identifies any errors with the links. You can also integrate this tool into Google Analytics for more insights.
3. Organic Search Traffic
Organic search traffic refers to the number of visitors who landed on your website directly from search engine results. They were not drawn to your site from social media, backlinks, or paid ads. The best tool to track your organic search traffic is Google Analytics.
Stats show that 40% of organic search traffic convert to sales. Since these are visitors who were actively searching for the product when coming online, unlike those drawn in from social media, backlinks, and paid ads. The latter group is often in the stage of being convinced into buying the product. Thus, to run a profitable business, you need to track this metric and tweak each aspect of it to optimum levels.
4. Top Exit Pages for Organic Traffic
The top exit page refers to a visitor’s last page before they ‘exited’ your website. If you know the last page they were on before they left, you can better curate content for those pages to convince them to hang around longer on your site. Again, Google Analytics is the best tool for this insight.
5. Pageviews per user
Pageviews encompass two metrics; the number of visitors that viewed a particular page and the time spent by each visitor per given page. This insight will help you know the content that attracts the most visitors and which ones are less interesting.
You can then tweak those pages with fewer Pageviews with content similar to those pages with higher Pageviews. You can further enrich the content by doing more research, fine-tuning your analysis, or integrating micro-interactions elements in the pages.
6. New v/s Returning Visitors
You need to keep an eye on the numbers of returning visitors versus new visitors. Having a high number of returning visitors could mean you have built trust and loyalty from your consumers towards your brand.
On the flip side, it could mean you are not doing enough to widen your keywords net or strengthening your marketing campaign to draw in new visitors. So you need to do further research on how to break into newer traffic flows while maintaining your current traffic.
7. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate metric measures the number of visitors who land on your website, look around for a few seconds, and exit the site without clicking on anything else — the lower the bounce rate, the better. However, if you have a high bounce rate, it will mean you need to revisit your website content and keywords used.
It could be you are using the wrong keywords, thus drawing in the wrong demographics. It might also mean your website content is simply not that interesting, and you need to make it more enticing to visitors.
8. Page Speed
Your visitors must get the information they’re looking for fast and first. A recent study showed that a page load speed of more than three seconds leads to a 32% increase in bounce rates. As a rule of thumb, keep your page load time less than two seconds. Luckily, tools such as Pingdom and GTmetrix can help you analyse this metric.
9. Conversion Rate
This metric is the most important as it measures how all your efforts, time, and money translates to sales. Conversion rate refers to the rate of visitors who make a purchase or do the desired action versus those who browsed and exited.
On this front, Google Analytics proves to be a critical tool. It enables you to set up a conversion goal in your dashboard. Thus you are always aware of whether or not you are working towards your set goals.
Search Engine Optimization a Must
A good SEO campaign will have higher numbers on the metrics mentioned above. If that is not the case, then you are doing your business an injustice. In today’s world, a business must have an online presence. That presence must play nice with search engines, actually Google.
If, after reading the above, you think this is too much work. Well, no worries! We have SEO experts whose primary job is to keep tabs on the latest Google search trends. They then learn, unlearn, and relearn how to pivot on these trends. Give us a call today, and leave the brain-tasking SEO work to our experts as you focus on other aspects of running your business.