All that You Need to Know about SEO Metrics

The year 2018, is all set to witness a phenomenal change in the search engine optimization arena. It is highly recommendable for the marketers to plan their SEO strategy along with their content marketing plans. It is a known fact that with the evolution of technology, the search engine algorithm is also changing for better. SEO has shifted its focus from being keyword based to more of being contextual.

Struggling to get to the first page of Google search is an eternal story. Don’t think you are alone in this fight; many other companies are also trying tirelessly to reach that page one of Google search result. With Google’s new addition of feature snippets, longer meta descriptions, knowledge panels and more, chalking out the SEO strategy has become a humongous job.

Here are a few SEO metrics that you should be aware of to get your organic SEO rolling:

Checking the number of clicks

You can take the help of different SEO metrics checkers to access an authentic report of a number of clicks that your webpage has received in a month, and it has been generated by which search queries. The next thing to do is to compare the monthly click reports. This will help you to determine which search queries have generated the maximum number of clicks per month.

This way you will have an exact idea of which page matter is driving the user to click on your website. Here Google Search Console plays a big role in generating search analytics report. Just click on the ‘Search Traffic’ and go to ‘Search Analytics’ to get an overview of monthly clicks on your website.

Analyse the bounce rate

It is quite hard to keep an audience hooked to the website for a long time. If someone visits one page on your site and leaves without visiting any other page, Google Analytics by default will report a high bounce rate.

A high bounce rate can indicate negative or positive metric. This can say your website has failed to provide the information the user was looking for. On the other hand, it can indicate that the user got what he or she was looking for and left immediately.

This can be a little critical to judge. To check out the actual reason for leaving, you can go to the ‘Behaviour’ and check the ‘Site Content’ as well as the ‘Landing page’ to know better.

You need to check the exit pages

It is hard to understand why the users are visiting and leaving the webpage. To get to the core of this, you need to understand from which page or pages the visitors are losing interest and leaving your website.

For your website to gain more attention, it is important to know whether the pages need more improvement to keep a user engaged or not. By conducting different tests on these pages, you will be able to determine the reason for bounce rate and achieve the result that you want.

To generate the exit page report, you need to go to the ‘Behaviour’ click on ‘Site Content’ and check the ‘Exit Pages.’

Keyword plays an important role

Keyword is not the only SEO metric that has to be tracked to know the result of the SEO strategy. But it still holds a powerful place in determining the traffic on our website. For this, you need to understand which keywords are dragging the maximum traffic to the website. Once you have a fair idea, your chances of hitting the top of the search engine results page become high.

The ‘Queries’ report in the Google Search console will show you how your keywords are placed. From this page, you will get an insight on which keyword is trending and which keyword is failing to get a click. This is one of the most important SEO metrics that matter a lot.

Is your website responsive to a smartphone?

Smartphones have created hype over the last few years. Google has repeatedly warned websites that load at a slow pace on the smartphones to improve or else they will end up at the bottom of the search engine result pages.

Understanding the proper reasons for this failure and taking some actions immediately is highly recommendable. Making your website smartphone friendly will work in your favor in making your website a visible one in the search engine pages of Google.

To understand this better, go to the ‘Search Traffic’ in the Google Search Console and select ‘Mobile Usability.’ You will get a complete report about the performance of your website on smartphones.

Check the crawl errors

If Google is unable to crawl your webpage, it is a great thing to worry about as your website will have a slim chance of appearing on the SERPs. For this, you need to have a thorough understanding of which all pages are preventing Google from crawling your webpage. Once you understand this, you can improve those pages and get them to function properly.

You can access the Crawl error report by clicking on the ‘Crawl’ option in the Search Console. Once you determine this, don’t wait for any further repair immediately.

Judge the quality of inbound links

Backlinking has always been very important part of Search engine optimization. With passing time, the quantity of those links has lost importance, now it is all about quality of those links.

The quality of inbound links matter, it helps in judging efforts related to the off-page SEO. To generate this report, you need to click on ‘Traffic Source’ then go to ‘Sources/Medium’ and check the ‘Referral’ in the Search console. Generating this report will help you to strategize the appropriate link building campaigns to gain maximum output from all the SEO efforts.  

But before starting off any SEO campaigns, it is better to gather knowledge about the Google SEO metrics and then getting into the work. Knowing the SEO metrics is very important for running a successful SEO campaign and to attract more traffic towards the website.