The 6 Most Important SEO Metrics Every Marketer Should Monitor

Deciding on the SEO metric to focus is essential to marketing success. After all, the point of understanding SEO metrics is to gather insights from the performance data. With these insights, you can understand what’s working and what’s not. Here are 6 SEO metrics you should pay attention to in any digital marketing campaign.

1) Organic Traffic 

Organic traffic has to be one of the most important metrics to monitor. As your traffic continues to grow, you will naturally become more interested in quality traffic over quantity.

Organic traffic comes from search queries through search engines. Amongst the different types of traffic, organic is the most indicative of your website’s overall health. In other words, it represents how well your site ranks for the targeted keywords.

As you introduce more keywords into your content strategy, your ranking increases on the Search Engine Results Page, thereby increasing your organic traffic as well. By posting relevant and optimised content, your organic traffic will also improve.

There are several other types of traffic such as Direct, Social, Paid and more. You should have a data analytics tool in place to help you monitor these figures over time. As organic traffic improves, so will your other traffic sources.

2) Bounce Rate 

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who arrived at your site and left without taking further action. With Google Ads, it can often lead to expensive ads that do not provide value for the campaign.

There are mainly 3 types of bounce rate:

1. Users who visit your site and didn’t like it or need it; clicked on the wrong thing
2. Users who visit your site but didn’t see what they wanted; clicked on the wrong page
3. Users who visit your site but could not interact with the page.

For (i), there is nothing much we can do. However, for (ii) and (iii), we can develop keyword-focused landing page, helping visitors to the relevant answers they might be seeking.

3) Conversion Rate 

To see how traffic adds value to your marketing efforts, we look at the conversion rate. It refers to the percentage of visitors that took a defined action to move toward a sale.

Throughout the buyer’s journey, we have several types of conversions, such as:

• Subscribing to an email newsletter
• Registering for product demo or consultation
• Making a purchase

You may break down your conversion optimisation along the different events to see where conversions fall off throughout your entire marketing funnel.

4) Dwell Time

Dwell time refers to the average amount of time a user spends on your page within a session. It is different from bounce rate since the latter also includes zero-second sessions into your total.

You should be aiming for a higher dwell time.
High dwell time could mean:

• Visitors are finding your content relevant and informative. In other words, they are actually reading it.
• Visitors are consuming important content as they near a buying decision

5) Page Exits

Page exits are useful as they tell us where we ‘lost’ the person. While any user can exit on any page, do keep a look out for a clear pattern.

If there is one page which is driving many visitors to exit, then there is definitely a problem:

• Visitors could not find what they had hoped to
• A poorly designed page which did not make for a good user experience

6) Return Traffic 

Return traffic indicates interest in your content and a growing awareness of your brand. Initially, traffic might not be high. By implementing a content strategy, graphics and video, thought leadership as well as social media, you will encourage return traffic. Moreover, returning traffic might choose to share your content on social media, allowing you to future expand your reach.

There you have, 6 SEO metrics to consider when implementing your digital marketing campaign. However, SEO in itself is not enough to rank well. Remember that SEO works best with a strong content strategy. But don’t just do content for the sake of it, build a connection with the people you want to reach. Unsure how? Start with blogging.

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