What you don’t measure, does not exit. SEO has been around for a long time and it is one of the most important growth levers for most business. However with great power come great responsibility. While SEO can give a business competitive advantage, measuring the right metric for your business is importantAnd as the saying goes, what you don’t measure, you can’t improve. So if you are a business and you have employed an SEO company or you have your own in-house team, and you have been confused about the right metrics to measure, then this guide will help youWhat Is An SEO Metric?An SEO metric is a fact or figure that you are measuring and which is an important key performance indicator of your SEO effort.What Is A Key Performance Indicator?A key performance indicator is an important metric to the growth of your business. This could range in anything from how many people visits your site to how many people actually converts on your site.What you need to know here is that a KPI can be different for different business. Also your KPI can also be different depending on the state of your business. Let us take the example of a dental firm.When this business is just going online, their KPI might be increase in traffic or increase in ranking for their main keywords.But as this particular business matures, the KPI’s will shift to meet the level of maturity of the business.Let’s now look at the most important SEO key metrics to measure.1.) Organic Visibility:The first most important SEO metric to measure is the organic visibility of the site. This you can measure by looking at the amount of keywords your website is ranking for Month over Month and Year over Year.2.) Keyword Ranking:While there is nothing like a personalized search result, showing up for the right keyword is an important SEO key metric you should measure. On a weekly or monthly basis, you want to see which keywords you are ranking for and where you are ranking for the keywords.As you are aware, the higher you rank for a particular keyword, the greater the traffic you will get to your business since 60% of the traffic for a particular keyword will go to website ranking at the first position.3.) Transactions:Call it transactions if you are an ecommerce business or call it Sales leads. Whichever name you give to it, tracking how much sales comes from organic traffic is an important key indicator you should be measuring4.) Revenue:Tied directly to transaction is revenue. You have to track the amount of revenue your SEO effort is bring to your business. If your ROI from your organic traffic is low, then you might be targeting the wrong keywords.5.) Bounce Rate:Bounce rate is also another important metrics to measure. Bounce rate is calculated as the percentage of people who leave your website from the page they landed o without any further interaction with the site.Let us for the sake of example say your website bounce rate is 70%. This means for every 10 people that visits your website, 7 of them leaves without any further interaction.6.) Time On Site:Time spent on time is another critical SEO metric to measure. Not all pages on your website are created equally. Some more pages are important than the other. This pages are usually your money pages because they help convert visitors to leads for your business. If you suddenly find out people are spending too much time on these pages or too little time, it might be an indication that something is wrong with the pages.7.) Conversion Rate:Conversion optimization is the percentage of people that takes your desired action on your website. No matter the type of website you have, your conversion rate is important.Most website convert at around 2-3%%. If your website conversion is lower than this, then you need to look at the most important pages on your website and see where people are dropping off.8.) Number Of Links:Backlinks are important to your organic ranking so tracking the number of backlinks your website is acquiring on a monthly basis especially if you are involved in any link building campaign is crucial.Depending on the velocity of your campaign, you may want to measure# of link acquired on a monthly basisDA of the domains your backlinks are coming fromAnchor text usedThe Best SEO Metrics Reporting Tool:Once that we have discussed which SEO metrics you should be measuring, your next question will typically be “which are the best tools to use in measuring your SEO performance.”While there are no shortage of tools you can use depending on the level of resources available to you, there are two tools that are free and a must-have for every business.Introducing Google Analytics:Google Analytics is Google’s own analytics tools which shows you how users interact on your website. When properly configured, you can see a lot of data about how users navigate your website and use it.The Google Analytics tool is divided into 3 core components viaAudience – Here you see the characteristics of your users. You will see their age, gender, location and other important data about your users.Acquisition – Acquisition is one of my favorite section in Google Analytics. The Google Analytics acquisition report shows your where your website traffic is coming from and how well each channel is performing.Behavior – The behavior tab shows how users interacts with your content. In this report, you get a chance to see how your website pages are performing. You can see which pages are performing poorly and make efforts to fix itConversion – Another important segment in Google Analytics you should be paying attention to is your conversion segment. Here you can tied the result of your marketing activities directly to your sales effort.Here is a sample image of how you can use Google Analytics to track almost all your important metrics from one single tab.Conclusion:Measuring SEO metrics that affects the bottom line of any business is important to your survival as an SEO specialist either in-house or an SEO Agency. If you measure the wrong metrics that do not have significant impact on the business, then you might as way be on your way to a low SEO performance result at the end of the project.About the Author:Adegboye Adeniyi is the Head of Growth and SEO at VTNS Solutions, a leading SEO Company in Nigeria. SEO, Coffee and Chess Lover.Find Me On GooglePlus | Facebook | Twitter
