Top Metrics to Measure for SEO Performance

In this lecture you’re going learn how to measure success.

Looking at five different metrics and using two free tools, I’ve actually got the tools on the metrics listed here on the first point of our know checklist.

Google Analytics
Ahrefs
Yoast SEO Plugin
Google Search Console
Page Speed insights

Google Analytics

So we’re going to start off in Google Analytics and we’ve set this up earlier in the course already

I’m going to be giving you this dashboard where you can see an overview of the Google Analytics section.

But essentially I just want to show you now what SEO success might look like and how you were actually measured and the metrics that you would use.

I don’t expect you to see this fully in a week or even a couple of weeks as SEO takes a while to really get working and for you to really achieve and get visitors from the search results.

But I want to show you what the end of the process should look like right at the start.

So you really know what you’re working towards and the metrics that you should be looking at.

Web Site Traffic

First Should be Web site traffic.

How would you calculate and see in Google Analytics for the Web traffic just coming from the search engines?

Well, I can see here I’ve got a breakdown of my traffic sources by the different mediums. essentially the different marketing channels.

And I can see that from Google the organic traffic here represents 23 percent of my website traffic over the last 30 days.

This is by default set to the last 30 days.

So that’s one hundred and six sessions in total.

You can see that using Google Analytics it’s very easy for me to see how much search engines are contributing.

And terms of visitors to our Web site and that’s a great percentage and you can see that’s pretty big for other more established sites it could be a lot bigger.

30-40-50-60 percent really depends on the effort and time that you put into it.

Conversions

Now let us move on to the second and it’s your metric that you should look at to measure success and that is conversions.

So not only do we want to see how much traffic the search engines are bringing us but we also want to see how much of that traffic is actually converting.

Now in this particular Web site The goal is slightly different is to get them to actually enroll and make a purchase.

You can see that here using this little chart which you’ll be getting later in the Google Analytics section.

I can see that organic The channel has contributed a goal can completions which represents 1.56 percent my total goal completion.

So I can see very easily how that is performing relative to other marketing channels.

Very last metric you might want to look at in Google Analytics to measure success is revenue.

Revenue

Now I haven’t actually assigned a revenue value within Google Analytics but that is something else that you can also measure.

if you’ve technically got that linked up and if you’ve got a check in your web site you can measure all that.

So you can really see not only the number of visitors the percentage of conversions but actually, the dollar amounts that’s coming through from the search engines.

Power tool

So we looked at the first three metrics there if we want to look at two other important SEO metrics we can use a tool like ahrefs and there’s a lot of similar tools but I’m just going to use this one as an example.

And the key things that we want to look at here are you actually search position for a particular keyword and also the number of links that you have achieved.

Because remember that’s a very important part Ranking search and so we’re in high stress here.

This is a premium tool although I’m using the free version here and you can see it gives you a huge amount of information.

So what I can see up here is the number of bottlings the number of links that I have to my site.

And I can see the growth of that in this chart here.

So this is something very simple but a key metric.

Are you increasing your bottlings over time that’s really going to help you increase your authority

and help you rank higher in the search results.

The other metric that you might want to look at is your position for certain keywords.

Organic keywords

If I scroll down I can see here we go top five organic keywords.

So these are really my search position for these keywords and you can see for a lot of these here are ranking on the first page which is fantastic.

Now if I’m going to view the full report here I get a little bit more information on this and see you can see for example that I’m up to nine positions for this particular keyword.

I’m up nine positions for this particular keyword as well.

I can see the search volume for all of these keywords and my position here and the estimated traffic is cetera.

So this is a fantastic tool to really measure these two key metrics which are keyword ranking and the number of links and you can see here that you can get quite a lot of information for free.

But you have to upgrade then if you want to see the full list and more information.

So I would recommend that if you have a Web site that’s been open running for a while and you can upload this right here.

Now if you’ve got a block or brand new websites you’re probably going to see no information here because you have no traffic on your site or this tool hasn’t picked it up.

So let me type in my brand new site here and what I am expecting to see is no data and there’s no traffic on my side I’ve got no bottlings or nothing set up.

So this is what you can expect to see at the top at the start.

And just remember that this is a third party tool this is not Google.

They don’t have direct access to your Web site so that they can pick up a lot of information but it’s not instant.

So just keep that in mind as well and to recap then what we have talked about in this lecture is the five key metrics to measure your success