seo metrics

Most Important SEO Metrics You Need to Track in 2022

SEO Metrics to Track in 2022

SEO Metrics are essential for determining whether your website is doing well! Especially if you are going to invest time and money in your digital marketing budget for SEO. It is important that your investment has worthwhile results. 

seo metrics

You may be wondering what the best ways to measure your SEO success are. The important question to ask is  “What are SEO metrics and which ones should I use?”

One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing generally is that there are many elements that you can measure to evaluate your success. There are websites dedicated to providing website analytics, including powerful tools like Google Analytics that offer a wealth of information on site performance.

As long as you make an effort to pay attention it is easy to keep track of your SEO status with all of the SEO Metrics tools available. So, you just follow along with this article to learn what to check on and you will never be in the dark about whether your SEO efforts are paying off. You should always be aware of whether your website is performing well enough to meet all of your goals. 

So, how do you decide what to focus on with all the data available? It might be hard to figure out what you should focus on when you look at a long report on your website. Just Google Analytics by itself has enough information to be completely overwhelming to a beginner. 

To get started we’ll discuss the 7 most important SEO metrics that you need to be tracking in 2022, plus the best tools to get the information you need. These SEO metrics are vital to keeping track of your website progress and understanding the effectiveness of any of your digital marketing or SEO efforts. 

Intro to SEO Metrics 

If you’re new to monitoring and reporting your SEO results, you may have a few questions about what the process involves.

Fortunately, SEO tracking is more straightforward than it may sound. It simply involves determining which metrics are most important for your business, then monitoring those metrics on a regular basis to track your progress.

In order to successfully keep tabs on SEO metrics and create shareable reports for you and your team, it is vital to choose the right metrics to focus on. When you select a handful of metrics, you can create reports that are much more digestible, manageable, and helpful reports will make it easier to gauge how your strategy is performing and can provide an at-a-glance look at your success for anyone else within your company who wants to see results.

Seo metrics

SEO Metrics Definition

By now we have discussed the term SEO metrics a bunch of times. So let’s make sure that you know exactly what it means. 

A metric itself is a quantifiable measure of one specific piece of data, basically, it is a number that measures something. In essence, when you build your reports using SEO metrics, you focus on actual measurable numbers that can be used to gauge success. This means that everything boils down to easy-to-measure data points related to SEO. 

SEO Tracking Metrics That Matter

Marketers and site owners today have access to a super huge amount of data about their online performance.

And to be clear, almost all of these data points can provide valuable insight. If you’re ever looking for answers to questions about how an individual tactic is working, or how a specific page is performing, that information is almost always available if you know where to look. But for the purpose of tracking your overall performance on a regular basis, this data is entirely too much.

Here are the most important SEO Metrics for the tracking process that you should focus on first:  

SEO Metrics to Track: #1 Organic Traffic

One of the most important metrics for measuring SEO results is organic traffic.

That’s because this number represents all of the visitors your site is attracting solely from organic search. So while your overall traffic numbers can give you an idea of your site’s general performance, narrowing in on organic traffic is a better way to measure your SEO strategy’s direct impact.

After all, one of the main goals of any SEO strategy is to improve your visibility in search for keywords related to your business and industry — and it stands to reason that if you’re succeeding, the number of visitors you attract from search results should steadily increase.

You can get this information easily on Google Analytics. You should look at your organic traffic over a 30 day period to get the best idea of the progress of your website. You can also look over a longer time period to identify trends. 

Keep in mind that overall organic traffic metrics are usually provided sitewide. You also need to track organic traffic by landing page. Why? Because that’s how you can determine where you need improvement.

The longer you focus on your SEO metrics the more data you will have on file. You need to keep the month-over-month and year-over-year reports because they are a great way to visualize the long-term impact your SEO has on your site.

SEO Metrics to Track: #2 CTR

Your CTR, or clickthrough rate, indicates the percentage of searchers who visit your site after seeing one of your pages in search results. It’s a stat you should pay attention to because it tells you more than just how well your pages rank in the SERPs. It also tells you how much the content appeals to people.

If people like what they see of your content in the search results, they’ll click the link. If not, they’ll move on to another result.

For example, if ten different users saw one of your pages ranking in Google’s results for a particular keyword, but only two of them clicked and visited your site, your CTR would be 20%.

This metric is one of the best indicators of how effective your pages are at grabbing users’ attention in search results. As a result, it’s also a solid indicator of the quality of your site’s title tags and meta descriptions. If you have a low CTR you may need to update or improve the copy of these sections. 

CTR also lets you know if your content itself is relevant to users searching particular keywords. You may need to update your content if your CTR is low on important keywords to your website. 

SEO Metrics to Track: #3 Bounce rate

When a visitor lands on a page on your site, then leaves without continuing to another page, this is called a “bounce.”

The percentage of visitors who do this, then, is known as your “bounce rate.”

And it’s a great indicator of whether your site’s content is in line with what users expect when they choose one of your pages from the list of search results.

If a large percentage of your visitors opt to leave your site and choose a different page from the results, this tells you that the page they’re landing on doesn’t contain the information that they wanted or needed.

But if your bounce rate remains low, you can be confident that your pages ranking in search are effective in providing what your visitors want — and that those pages are helping you reach your SEO goals.

SEO Metrics to Track: #4 Keyword Rankings

This metric is one of the most important and one of the easiest to track. 

As you work towards improving your site’s rankings for keywords that are important to your business, it makes sense that you’d want to monitor how your rankings for those keywords change.

You might choose to do this manually for some of your most important keywords. After all, simply performing a Google search for those keywords will show you exactly where you stand.

But beyond that, you can get a more comprehensive look at your rankings using an online tool. One option is to use the one provided to Accessily Premium users on their dashboard. 

This way you can keep track of the most important keywords that you are trying to rank for on search engines. If your landing page ranking is not improving for your target keywords it is really an important time to reevaluate your SEO strategy. 

Maybe you need to improve your website copy or invest in more high-quality backlinks using these keywords as anchor text. These types of adjustments can have a huge impact on your future results. You can also do keyword research to find easy keywords in your niche to aim to rank on. If you are interested you can read about a great type of keyword, long-tail keywords, in this blog post.

SEO Metrics to Track: #5 Domain authority

One of the most important goals of any SEO strategy is to improve the site’s level of authority in Google’s eyes. The level of authority is directly proportional to many areas of online success. 

This is one of the more difficult SEO metrics to measure because Google considers so many different factors in determining website authority and not all of these factors are public knowledge. SEO experts do know that backlinks are definitely related to the authority which is a helpful SEO metric we will get to soon. 

There are two major websites that measure domain authority, Moz and Ahrefs. Each of these websites ranks your domain authority on a scale of 1 to 100. The closer to 100 that your website is the better, but this metric takes time to improve. 

Keeping an eye on this number is an easy way to gauge the impact of your link-building strategy, and can help you measure how your site’s level of credibility improves over time.

SEO Metrics to Track: #6 Total Backlinks and Backlinks from Unique Domains 

In addition to measuring your site’s domain authority, it can also be helpful to monitor your site’s number of incoming links and referring domains.

While your number of incoming links includes all of the links pointing to your site, your number of referring domains represents the number of unique domains from which you have incoming links.

So although these metrics may seem extremely similar, it’s wise to monitor both. And considering how easy tools like Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker make this process, there’s no reason not to.

And though every link you earn has the potential to improve your authority, links from new domains will almost always have a bigger impact than links from sites that already link to you.

So including both of these numbers in your reports can give you a more well-rounded look at your link-building results.

SEO Metrics to Track: #7 Page speed

User experience plays a major role in your site’s ability to rank well and convert your visitors into customers, and one of the biggest factors in the experience your site provides is page speed.

So as you optimize your site, it’s important to keep an eye on whether your changes have an impact on your load times.

Fortunately, this is an easy metric to monitor using Google’s Page Speed Insights.

seo metrics

There are two main options for monitoring your page speed. If you prefer a more technical approach, you can include your page load times in FCP and DCL. But if you’re not familiar with these metrics, you can also opt to simply use Google’s optimization score.

Either way, monitoring these metrics will help you easily understand this key part of the user experience your site provides — and can help you spot any issues before they harm your results.

SEO Metrics Tools

There are many different tools you can use to measure your site’s performance.

But when it comes down to it, you can gain all the insight you need to create helpful SEO reports from the following four.

SEO Metrics Tools: #1 Google Analytics

It should come as no surprise that one of the best tools for measuring your SEO performance is Google’s own platform, Google Analytics. This tool offers more insight than virtually any other tool available. Plus, it’s 100% free.

Today, it’s considered a standard tool for site owners and marketers — so if you’re not already using it to measure your site’s performance, you’ll want to install it as soon as possible.

SEO Metrics Tools: #2 Google Search Console

Search Console is another Google-owned tool for monitoring site performance. But unlike Analytics, which focuses on measuring on-site actions, Google Search Console is primarily designed to help site owners monitor how their pages appear in search. You can use it to see which of your pages appear in search results, as well as each page’s CTR.

SEO Metrics Tools: #3 Accessily 

If you use Accessily for guest posts and backlink acquisition you can easily track many SEO metrics on our platform. The “Traffic ROI” page shows all of the backlinks that you have from Accessily orders.

You can also use our keyword tool to see how your website ranks for relevant keywords. In addition managed service users get monthly user analytics reports with traffic, backlink, and keyword data. 

SEO Metrics Conclusion

If you’re ready to get a more accurate idea of how your SEO efforts are impacting your business, you’ll want to spend some time determining which metrics are most important for your goals —  and you may be surprised by the results you uncover. Get started tracking your SEO metrics today so you can fine-tune your strategy for success! 

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