Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
After conducting SEO for a period of time, you want to see if the time and effort you’re spending on improving your site is giving you a return on your investment. But where do you begin? There are hundreds of different metrics you can track to evaluate performance, and knowing how to read and interpret them is even more important in getting an accurate understanding of how your site is performing.
In this article, we’ll take you through which metrics you should be tracking to evaluate SEO performance and which metrics should be avoided as vanity metrics.
Metrics you should be reporting
Organic Traffic – This is the most frequently reported metric by SEOs, as it shows how much traffic is coming to the site through search engines. Obviously, this is important for SEOs because their work is designed for their content to appear higher on search engines. However, even though this is an important metric, it still needs to be reported on in tandem with other metrics to make it worthwhile. It’s no good reporting to your clients that your organic traffic has grown by 50% if conversions haven’t improved or people are only staying on your site for seconds before leaving.
Bounce Rate and Engagement Rate – Bounce rate is an important metric to report on besides your organic traffic because it lets u know if the traffic is actually staying on your site. The higher your bounce rate, the more people are coming to your site and leaving immediately. If users are engaging with your content once getting onto your site and your engagement rate improves, then they are much more likely to convert.
Keyword Rankings – Using keywords in your content to target specific customers searching for certain content is one of the fundamental principles of SEO. Therefore, tracking how you are ranking for certain keywords is important in determining how successful your content is and if you need to create new content.
Revenue (E-Commerce) – If you’re an E-Commerce business, then reporting on revenue is obviously important because this is your final conversion. (For a non-e-commerce business, you still want to be reporting on your own conversion metrics. This is crucial because it’s the final output of all the hard work you’re putting into the site. It also gives you more information about your traffic. For example, if your organic traffic has grown by 30% but your conversions (revenue) haven’t improved, then you know your site is not converting well, and you can look into this to try to fix it.
Vanity metrics to avoid
Impressions – Many people report on impressions to show an SEO campaign has been successful, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. You could be appearing on search engines, and people are seeing your content, but if they aren’t clicking on it, engaging with it and converting, then impressions on their own are useless. Of course its helpful for your content to be in a position where it is seen, but you also want this to transfer into conversions; otherwise, your campaign has been ineffective.
Average Keyword Rankings – While keyword rankings are important for understanding how well you’re performing on search engines for specific queries, average keyword rankings are less so. Average keyword rankings take all the keywords you are tracking and give you an average ranking position, and then if this goes up or down, you can determine if your keywords are performing well or poorly. The problem with this is that it treats all keywords as being equal in value. If you’re performing really well for a large number of insignificant keywords that don’t get you much traffic but underperform on the few important keywords you need to perform well for, an average ranking would tell you that you’re doing well when, realistically, only your low-value content is performing well.
Organic traffic without conversions – We have already briefly touched on this previously, but if you’re getting traffic without converting, then your business is no more successful than it was before you started your organic campaign. Make sure you report on how conversions have improved with organic traffic; otherwise, your analysis is moot.
By understanding which different metrics you should and shouldn’t be tracking when reporting on your SEO campaign, you will be able to make data-informed decisions for future campaigns that will leave your business in the best position to be successful organically.
