If you have an online business and don’t know about SEO, you are either new on the block or living under a rock.
In the recent digital marketing landscape, you need SEO now more than ever.
Let’s say you want soda, but you press the wrong button on the vending machine and get a protein shake instead.
Similarly, a single SEO mistake can alter the end result, wasting your time and money. Therefore, SEO tracking is important for everyone who aims for a solid online presence.
Today, we will give you a scoop on everything related to SEO rank tracking.
SEO Tracking (Explanation)
The practice of assessing the success of internet marketing that you or your rivals have implemented is known as SEO tracking.
This entails carrying out a thorough review of SEO analytics. SEOs usually do this to assess the efficacy of a specific SEO strategy and make necessary adjustments based on the results.
However, obtaining information on a variety of random metrics is unlikely to provide the solutions you require.
All you’ll have in the end is a ton of data that takes hours to process. Selecting the appropriate metrics to track is the first step in maximizing the benefits of SEO tracking.
The performance reports from a trustworthy source will be more comprehensible and beneficial to a business. Once the team comprehends it, it becomes simple to share the details with the clients.
Components of SEO Tracking
Digital marketing for small and large companies have distinct goals. Nevertheless, one of the main goals of marketing and SEO should be finding the purpose of the business and identifying the user’s pain points.
Whatever goals a business decides, they should have one thing in common, which is measurability.
In other words, you must be able to track or measure your performance to make necessary improvements at any point.
Fundamentally, SEO rank tracking comprises three steps:
- Defining the goal of the SEO campaign
- Choosing the SEO metrics that align with your goals to track the functionality of the strategies used
- Frequently track and amend according to the reports with time
10 Important Quantifiable SEO Metrics
It’s not usual for people to get lost on the road when tracking metrics for SEO.
For those who don’t know which SEO metrics need evaluation, here is a list.
1. Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate shows your organic traffic quality, making it an important part of SEO tracking.
It’s a business indicator that evaluates the contribution of marketing to the company and is typically one of the first metrics that stakeholders and clients will look at.
The amount of conversions is split by the total number of visitors.
You may estimate the potential return on investment (ROI) that your website traffic may provide by knowing your conversion rate.
With this SEO tracking factor, you can shape your campaign.
If you receive a good volume of organic search traffic yet the conversion rates are low, you need to assess if the landing page satisfies the user intent or if it provides a good experience.
On the other hand, if the organic traffic is low, you can assess the keywords you are targeting to bring the traffic.
You can use different combinations of long-tail and short-tail keywords to build a keyword strategy that attracts prospective customers.
You can see how users visit your website with the help of the Google Analytics Behavior Flow report.
It’s helpful to observe the routes taken by those who convert successfully and by those who may hit a dead end.
2. Organic Traffic
Visitors to your website arrive organically via search engines like Google and Bing. Most importantly, they come from unpaid sources.
Examining your organic traffic figures should be the first step in your evaluation process to determine the success of your present SEO campaigns.
Once you are aware of your organic session stats, you may determine which channel generates more visits by looking at your website traffic sources report.
Being selected by searchers as the solution to their question is the aim of appearing in search results. With SEO tracking, you can learn you are on the path to accomplishing this goal.
You have an issue if you are ranking yet are not receiving any traffic.
Google Analytics is among the most accurate tools for measuring traffic.
There is so much data in Google Analytics that it might be daunting if you don’t know where to look.
It gives a broad overview of some of the traffic information without any costs. If you need more data on the traffic, you opt for paid tools.
Related Blog: 7 DIY SEO Software To Perform Better Online
3. Average Dwell Time Per Session
A short dwell time could suggest problems with the way the content is presented or the page’s accessibility and call for more research.
It gauges how long a searcher stays on your website before going back to the search engine results (SERPS). It gives valuable insight on:
- The benefit a searcher gets from your website
- How helpful your content was in responding to their inquiries
- Whether your writing is comprehensible, relevant, and easy to read
- The degree to which your content marketing succeeded in instilling interest
You can monitor the bounce rate with SEO tracking, which is a terrific way to find out if your visitors have a positive experience on your website.
4. Bounce Rate
On average, the bounce rate ranges from 26% to 70%.
You should see it as an alarming situation if it is less than 20% and more than 40%.
SEO tracking this parameter informs us very little about a user’s experience. Many attempt to lower this measure because they think it has something to do with the quality of the website.
However, the bounce rate is just one side of the story. Some websites may have a high bounce rate and conversion rate.
That suggests that the users find what they want in the first five seconds. Or, the visitors may only be looking for menus, company hours, or an address before leaving with the plan to visit the business.
Scroll depth is more accurate for SEO tracking to assess the quality of a page or site.
5. Scroll depth
This SEO tracking metric calculates how long users scroll down specific web pages.
You can check scroll depth tracking in Google Analytics and find out:
- If the visitors view your content
- Level of content expertise
- If the users like consuming your content
If the SEO tracking results are not in your favour, experiment with placing multimedia, contact forms, and other material higher up on your page to see what works best.
6. Click-through Rate (CTR)
How successfully you’ve optimized your page title and meta description can be inferred from SEO tracking click-through rate.
It is the percentage of users who clicked on your page from search results. This information is available in the Google Search Console.
Furthermore, you may maintain and add tracking pixels to your website without changing the code by using Google Tag Manager, a free application. This greatly facilitates tracking particular website behaviour or triggers.
7. Backlinks
67.5% of SEO experts consider it to be one of the key ranking factors.
Therefore, you should never pass over this metric when it comes to SEO tracking.
You have to consider aspects like having connections from high-quality and relevant websites and a consistent increase in backlinks over time.
This will provide you with the most accurate indicators of your SEO effectiveness, along with the quantity of backlinks you have.
To view all such data and more, you can utilize Monitor Backlinks, Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, and Moz’s Link Explorer.
To know how your rivals excel at SEO and business, read up on the 10 Best Market Analysis Tools.
8. Site Health Check
An all-encompassing assessment of your SEO is known as an SEO health check. Along with highlighting individual mistakes and places needing correction, this SEO tracking metric gives you an overall impression of how crawlable and indexable your website is.
Here are the four components of a site health check:
Technical SEO: how indexable and crawlable is your website, and if there are any broken links, pages that load slowly, or unavailable URLs?
Content: how original is the content, and does it provide value?
Mobile-Friendliness: Is your website easily navigable and accessible from a mobile device?
Experience of the user: The degree to which the images, navigation, and other parts of your website are well-organized, as these factors influence user interaction.
You can use multiple tools for SEO tracking this characteristic, such as Search Console for indexability and crawl stats and speed check with Google Lighthouse.
9. Core Web Vitals And Speed
Google believes the three Core Web Vitals metrics include loading speed, interaction, and visual stability. SEO tracking gives you a realistic picture of the user experience.
It is not a random SEO rank tracking factor, as Google made it a component of the ranking algorithm in 2020.
Numerous web resources, such as PageSpeed Insights, Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse Audit, and Search Console, can be used to determine your page ranking score. These websites use a traffic light system to display page speed results.
PageSpeed Insights breaks into the outcomes and identifies areas that need improvement.
10. Domain Authority
A single Domain Authority (DA) score is produced by combining several elements, such as the total number of links and linking root domains.
Afterwards, this number can be used to compare websites or monitor a website’s ranking strength over time.
These are from the 200 ranking factors used by Google. But ranking doesn’t depend on all of them. These are small factors that may play a role as tiebreakers for a site.
Ahrefs has a Domain Rating and an Ahrefs Rank.
Domain Rating provides a 100-point rating of a website’s backlink profile strength in relation to other websites in the Ahrefs database.
AR ranks websites in the Ahrefs database based on the quantity and quality of their backlinks.
Semrush’s Authority Score can assess a domain or web page’s overall quality and SEO performance.
Correct Way of SEO Tracking
At first glance, it may appear that tracking data becomes more valuable the more parameters you monitor.
However, with SEO tracking, things aren’t always like that. You can obtain an understandable and useful picture of your SEO success by restricting your tracking to no more than three important variables at a time.
SEO rank tracking can be simple, but it can take hours or even days to comprehend the data.
So, you need to set up the appropriate dashboards, reports, and tools to make this process run more smoothly. Use SE Ranking, for example, for backlink tracking, website audits, and position tracking.
Lastly, make sure the metrics you choose for SEO tracking are in line with your company’s goals.
For example, tracking metrics like organic traffic and keyword ranking is crucial if your aim is to grow your clientele.
Don’t get your hands dirty on all keywords. Rather, keep an eye on those that may convert visitors into customers. In such situations, you can give commercial and transactional keywords more importance than informative ones.
FAQs
How does Google rank a website?
Google uses a variety of signals and features in its algorithm to identify which websites are most relevant to a given search. The terms of the query, the page’s relevancy, the source’s level of knowledge, and the searcher’s location are a few of the variables.
Does SEO tracking help with ROI?
Yes, it helps determine which content on your website converts visitors into buyers.
You can utilize this information to produce content that converts better and increases sales.
How does SEO tracking help with improving CTR?
You can match your average CTR with those of the top-ranking ones. You can alter the post’s title and meta-description if the click-through rate is below average. Make them memorable so that more people will click on them.
Final Thoughts
SEO tracking may take you to the peak of motivation or may lose all of it. Therefore, don’t take the numbers to your heart. You should embrace your mistakes and keep moving forward while making improvements.
By measuring metrics like organic traffic, conversion rate, CTR, Domain authority, site health score, speed, bounce rate, dwell time, scroll depth, and backlinks growth, your campaign will have a lesser chance of failing.
Seo rank tracking takes time as you will develop the skill of analyzing the report and formulating methodologies to fix the issue over a period.
If you don’t have time to set up your SEO tracking system, you can always get assistance from SEO experts like The Dreams Agency.