SEO has been a buzz-word in internet marketing for a while now, if you have a website you need to be optimising it for search engines. Whether you do it yourself or if you contract it out you still need to know if your SEO campaign is working. There are six key SEO metrics to measure your success you should be using to measure your SEO success.
These are:
- Keyword rankings
- Organic search traffic
- Key landing pages
- Share of traffic
- Domain authority
- Backlinks
Keyword rankings
This is the most obvious of all six key SEO metrics. if you are not ranking for any of your keywords then people will not find your site. However it’s always worth remembering… there is no point in ranking number one for a keyword that no one uses. Therefore it is important that the keyword research is done correctly, if it’s not then there is a good chance your keyword will not pull in relevant traffic to your site. There are tools such as SEO Moz to measure these, or you can do the searches yourself and see where you are.
Organic search traffic
Organic search traffic is the traffic that comes to your site as a result of people finding you on search engines such as Google. To get these figures you need to have Google Analytics set up on your site. The better your SEO the more organic traffic your site will receive. In many ways this is the most important metric, after all why do SEO if it’s not to pull in more traffic?
Key landing pages
This is another key metric that you get through Google Analytics. Every website should have key pages that are there to sell something to your visitors. The more people come to these pages the more chance you have of selling something! Using Analytics you can see which pages people are entering your site on and make sure that your keywords are taking people to the right place. If they are not then you know that either the wrong pages are being optimised or the pages have not been optimised enough.
Share of traffic
This key SEO metric takes a little bit of time to put together but can be very informative. Unfortunately there isn’t a single tool to pull this information together. The aim of this is to see how much of the total traffic for a particular keyword is coming o your site. To work this out need to to start with Google’s Adword Tool and look up the traffic for your chosen keyword (remember to use “Exact” and limit the tool to your chosen country). Once you have a figure for how many people used a certain term in the last month then head over to Analytics and look up how many people came to your site via the same keyword. Once you have both numbers divide your Analytics number by the Adwords number then times by 100. This will give you your percentage share of the traffic for that keyword.
Over time you want to see this percentage share increase.
Domain authority
Over the last couple of years SEO Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) has been replacing PageRank as the standard metric to compare sites against each other. It takes a lot of different factors into account then gives your site a score out of 100. the higher your score the better your site should be performing. To get your sites score simple head over to opensiteexplorer.org and enter your site. over time if your SEO campaign is working you should expect your score to increase.
Backlinks
The final key SEO metric is the number of good authority backlinks your site is obtaining. A quick way to work this out is to look at the DA of the site linking to yours, as a general rule of thumb if the site that is linking to you has a higher DA then your site then it’s worth having. To get a proper view of your backlink profile you will need to pay for some software.
There are many other sides to SEO but by looking at these six key metrics you should have a good idea how well your SEO campaign is going. If your site is not performing on any of these metrics then you need to be asking your SEO why.
