Navigating the complex world of SEO reporting can often feel overwhelming. With a myriad of metrics available, it’s crucial to pinpoint which ones truly matter to your strategy.
Whether you’re crafting a report for stakeholders or refining your own SEO approach, understanding the right metrics to track is essential.
To help you out, we’ve distilled insights from top global SEO leaders to pinpoint the most important metrics to monitor for enterprise SEO and organized them into 5 main categories:
If you’re just getting started with search engine optimization, we have a concise list of five key SEO metrics that you need to track!
Content Metrics
Content metrics show you how your web pages perform on the SERPs, but more importantly, they show you how searchers interact with your content.
Here are five of the most important content metrics to track.
#1. Rank Position
Despite massive changes on the SERPs and the proliferation of SERP features, it’s still important to track keyword rank.
Content that follows Google’s E-A-T framework (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) tends to provide value to the end users and have a good rank position.
If you’re content ranks on the second page of Google, you can refresh the content to try to enhance it to properly address the target query. But if you rank in a position higher than ~50, your content likely missed the mark and you may need to start from scratch.
#2. Impressions
Authoritative, trustworthy content should also have a high impression count. This can mean that the content is relevant for a number of keywords (which gives it a greater chance to be seen) or that it’s relevant for a high search volume term.
Regardless, it confirms that users see your listing on the SERP.
A high impression count can also help confirm that your content offers valuable information and is being presented to users, most likely, on page one of Google.
#3. Search Visibility
As mentioned, there have been many changes to the SERPs. This doesn’t mean that standard rank tracking is obsolete (see metric #1), it just means it has to be supplemented.
This is where search visibility comes in.
With personalized SERPs and search features like the Answer Box, images, ads, etc., it can be hard to get eyes on your content, even if you rank well organically.
This is why seoClarity introduced Visibility Share — a new way to track rankings based on actual pixel real estate on the SERP.
When Google recognizes your content as relevant and authoritative, it should not only offer it to users on page one, but ideally on the first fold of page one so users immediately see it.
#4. Click-through Rate (CTR)
For a user to click through to your site, your search listing has to be appealing.
Thus, a high CTR shows that users saw value and relevance in your listing.
To create an engaging listing that will generate organic traffic, some methods involve including an enticing title tag and meta description, plus any applicable schema.
Recommended Reading: How to Improve Your Site’s Organic Search Click-Through Rate
#5. Local Visibility
Relevancy goes beyond the search landscape at large and also includes local search visibility.
Depending on your type of business, it’s often important to monitor how the local audience views your content and if your site is being shown in search features like the map pack.
Engagement Metrics
Once users land on your site, it’s important to know how they interact with the content.
Engagement metrics can clue you in on how relevant your content is, but they don’t always tell the whole story. As such, they should always be analyzed in relation to the type of page they deal with.
#6. Average Time on Page
A long average time on page typically indicates that users found your page valuable and decided to explore.
For example, if your page is a blog post, a long time on page can signal that users are actually reading the content.
Granted, some pages are more likely to have a shorter time on page because of the nature of the content itself.
If a user just wants to know the weather, for example, a page with the week’s forecast will likely have a very short average time on page, but it’s no cause for concern. The users get what they’re looking for and continue on their search journey.
#7. Dwell Time
Dwell time is often confused with time on page, but there’s one key difference: dwell time accounts for the amount of time a user spends on a page after clicking through from the SERP. Average time on page, on the other hand, is simply the average amount of time a user spends on the page coming in from any channel (organic, paid, social, etc.)
Despite their differences, the same analysis applies for both metrics.
If users find that your website properly addresses their query, they’ll be more likely to stay on your page for a longer period of time. So, you can correlate dwell time with value.
However, the same exception applies: some pages are designed to immediately answer a query, and will naturally have a low dwell time.
Analyze your dwell time through the lens of the searcher. What you may think is a poor response signal may not be a cause for concern after all.
#8. Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate reveals how many users left your site after viewing only one page — which can shine a light on the users’ overall experience on your site.
A high bounce rate can imply that users don’t find your content to be valuable or relevant to their search.
But, like the time on page metric, bounce rate is subjective to its respective page and the content type.
A searcher may come to your site, immediately get the information they seek, and then leave.
There’s no reason for them to further explore your site.
Keep this in mind as you evaluate your pages’ bounce rates and don’t let it be a defining metric for understanding the end user experience.
Recommended Reading: What Your Bounce Rate Means for Your SEO
#9. Exit Rate
Exit rate tells you the percentage of users that left your site at any level of their search journey (whereas bounce rate is only concerned with the users viewing one page).
Google has a great reference on distinguishing between bounce rate and exit rate.
This metric can help you understand where users decide to leave your site. Does one page have a higher exit rate than others? You may want to optimize it for the end users.
Like the other engagement metrics we’ve covered, a high percentage doesn’t always mean there’s a problem. A search journey has to end somewhere and the users may be content on their way out.
Mobile Metrics
All of the above metrics are relevant for desktop, but they’re important to monitor on mobile, too!
Mobile continues to grow and become more important in the world of search and SEO. Each content and engagement metric should be analyzed for both desktop and mobile to fully understand your SEO performance and users’ behavior.
What works on desktop may not work on mobile. Your mobile audience has unique intents that your content must deliver upon.
Technical Metrics
Your development team has specific metrics that inform their work that also impact the end user experience.
Before you can focus on content’s relevance and your overall site authority, you first need to address usability.
Ultimately, content is meaningless if it doesn’t have a strong foundation to sit on.
#10. Crawlability Errors
Before a search engine can serve your content to users, that search engine’s bots must be able to crawl your pages.
You may have a great site, but it goes largely unnoticed if it can’t be crawled or indexed.
We worked with a company that had unknowingly implemented noindex tags, which prevented their content from appearing on the SERPs.
Once the crawlability error was resolved, they saw an incredible, consistent increase in search visibility.
Recommended Reading: How to Find (and Fix) Crawlability Issues to Improve Your SEO
#11. Number of Pages Indexed
If your pages aren’t in Google’s index, users won’t be able to find value in your content
Verify that the number of your indexed site pages aligns with the number of pages on your site. Of course, this won’t be an exact match since some pages, like log-in pages or security pages, don’t need to be indexed.
To get a quick understanding of how many of your site pages are indexed, type the following into Google search:
“Site: yoursite.com”
The number of search results is roughly the number of pages indexed.
#12. Page Speed
Page speed is a crucial metric to ensure a positive user experience. If you land on a webpage that doesn’t load quickly, you’ll likely bounce back to the SERP to choose another search listing.
In fact, every second counts.
Nearly half of consumers expect a webpage to fully render in 2 seconds or less.
You can monitor your page speed with a page speed testing tool. But larger enterprise sites would benefit from an SEO platform with the ability to audit page speed at scale — especially when there’s a direct relationship between page speed and conversion rate.
Recommended Reading: Page Speed and SEO: How to Improve User Experience and Rankings
Authority Metrics
Links — both internal and external — can impact your search engine optimization efforts. When you monitor your link profile, you take an extra step to ensure that your backlinks are healthy and authoritative, and that your internal links are relevant to their pages.
#13. Backlinks
To evaluate your website’s authority, you’ll need to run a backlink analysis and monitor the respective metrics.
This shows you the number of referring domains and reveals the number of authoritative links that point to your site.
A high number of quality referring domains and links can signal to Google that others find your content valuable.
#14. Internal Linking Structure
Your internal linking structure can significantly influence how users interact with your site and perceive its value.
It’s crucial that your site taxonomy and hierarchy are intuitively designed, directly influencing the user experience.
Consider the logic and coherence of your internal links—are they guiding users naturally through their search journey?
You should also evaluate your use of anchor text: does it effectively communicate the content of the destination page?
Executive Metrics
All of the above metrics relate directly to the end user experience. If you can meet the user along their search journey with a foundationally strong site with relevant, authoritative content, those searchers should convert and/or become leads.
These are the metrics that your executive team will care about the most, after all. They want to see how SEO is related to driving the business’s bottom line.
#15. Organic Conversion Rate
Organic conversion rate is crucial to monitor and improve as it demonstrates SEO’s ability to convert searchers into customers.
If you keep a close eye on the aforementioned metrics and optimize appropriately, your organic conversion rate should be in good standing.
#16. Return on Investment (ROI)
Similar to the organic conversion rate, ROI is one of the most influential metrics when it comes to proving the value of SEO to leadership.
Where does organic search fit into the company’s initiatives and goals at large? If you continually provide a positive site experience, the reward should be worth the investment.
#17. YOY Summary
Executive teams **** to see wins, and they also like to see positive patterns — i.e. wins over time.
When you provide a YOY summary of your efforts and outcomes of organic search, you can prove that SEO is a long-term solution that has the power to compound its successes.
Conclusion
Monitoring the right SEO metrics is the key to validating the impact of your efforts.
To streamline this process, seoClarity offers the industry’s ONLY real-time, data-driven SEO reporting and analytics platform, designed to simplify tracking these crucial metrics.
Book a demo today to discover how you can uncover opportunities, gain actionable insights, and effectively communicate your SEO achievements.
<<Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in January 2021 and has since been updated.>>
