1. Introduction to SEO Metrics
As an SEO specialist, measuring the hits of your work can be one of the most difficult parts of the job.
Once you have developed a basic website its time to develop a SEO strategy, only developing does not get you results you need to track it also. One of the most challenging factors about SEO is that you can’t always count on search engine rankings to instantly track your progress. Search engines can take weeks, even months to revise SERPs. And when they do, ranking progress is rarely distributed across your target keywords.
That’s why you require a more solid process to track SEO results.
Instead of hunting individual seo metrics, like traffic or rankings, you need to move to a diverse metric tracking system to determine SEO success.
In this blog, I’ll show you which are the most crucial SEO metrics that you must track.
2. The Most important SEO Metrics an SEO Specialist should know
2.1) Organic Traffic
All the SEO steps in the world are worthless unless it gets you organic traffic.
Tracking organic sessions over time is one of the strongest SEO metrics to track performance. A month-over-month increase in visitors from organic search shows that your rankings are improving (even for keywords you weren’t targeting).
While other metrics might show trends, this metric gives you quantifiable evidence that your actions are getting more guests, leads, and ideally conversions.
The grade of the search traffic, of course, will rely on which keywords you’re ranking for and how you determine conversions.
2.2) Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is a seo metric devised by Moz that indicates how well a website will rank on search engine results (SERPs). The score varies from 1 to 100, with 100 being ideal score.
Even though it is a very recognized and a worthy seo metric in the SEO Domain, Google does not consider it when ranking sites. DA score should be use as only a indicator of how successful your site is. It should be used as a relative measurement, rather than an absolute one.
In Google’s terms DA often referred as Site Authority”, Google favors some sites in search results more than others based on how authoritative the site is.
2.3) Page Authority
Page Authority (PA) is a seo metric created by Moz that signifies how well a page can rank. The score ranges from 1 to 100, with 100 being the ideal page.
PA estimates the overall value of a backlink profile. It does not represent an individual page’s ranking factor, but rather compares it with its competitors and focuses primarily on their respective links in order to measure who has better rankings or more visits from Google searches.
PA is a helpful ranking metric that can be used to determine the quality of your site. It’s best to not completely rely on it as an ultimate measure, however; there are many other factors like link building and keyword rankings that also affect how well you rank in search engines.
2.4) Citation Flow
The more sites that link to you, the higher your offsite citation flow will be. This new metric expressing a score from 0-100 aims at depicting how authoritative of the website might be according with many external sources linking back and forth between them!
Citation flow alone is not enough to determine the authority of a website, and it will work in conjunction with many other facets such as trustworthiness or expertise.
Citation Flow of Domain indicates how effective a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. All Links are not created with equal weight – and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger impact on URLs, Citation Flow is based on stronger, iterative mathematical logic than the old metric of AC Rank.
2.5) Trust Flow
Trust Flow of Domain / Subdomain / URL is a metric based on grade. On a scale between 0-100. Majestic collated many authorized seed sites are based on a manual review of the web. This strategy forms the footing of Majestic Trust Flow. Sites linked to a trusted seed site will see higher scores, whereas sites with some suspicious links would see a much lower score.
2.6) Referring Domains
Referring domain, also known as “ref domain”, is a website that has a backlink pointing to a page, or link, to the site you are analyzing.
2.7) Keyword Rankings
With Google’s AI-based search algorithm, a transformation towards personalization, and constantly adjusting search results, should you bother to track keyword rankings?
Yes.
Even though search results are rarely the same at the user level and 20% of inquiries are completely new, tracking keyword rankings means you two things:
The broad principle of your SEO measures: Better rankings for one keyword usually display improved rankings altogether, particularly for related long-tail keywords. Tracking keywords shows you the significance of your current SEO plan.
Keyword preference: If your other SEO metrics enhance (such as domain rating or organic traffic) but you don’t see progress in target keyword rankings, it usually implies poor keyword preference. In such a case, you should pick a less competitive keyword and try to rank by it.
2.8) New Backlinks
While on-page factors value, backlinks can even be a crucial factor in SEO implementation.
Between two pages with equivalent on-page scores (bounce rate, time on site, content quality, etc.), the one with more and relevant backlinks from higher-quality domains will considerably win.
A study by Backlinko analyzed 1 million Google search results and found the same thing — there is a strong correlation between rankings and the number of referring domains.
Backlinko
Tracking your backlinks and ref domains to get a broad idea of the efficacy of your search engine optimization actions. More no. of backlinks might not instantly lead to better rankings (particularly if the links are coming from low-quality domains), but they do indicate that you’re moving up on rank.
3. How to Use These Metrics
3.1) How to Use Organic Traffic
Tracking organic traffic is straightforward in Google Analytics. Simply log in to your dashboard and navigate to Acquisition > Overview, then choose “Organic Search.”
By default, this report will display your site’s organic traffic for the last month. You can see your total number of sessions, and how that number varied over the period of the month.
You can also change the time frame to get a more complete look at your organic traffic results so that you can see whether your SEO efforts are paid off.
3.2) How to Use Domain Authority Metric
You can find out the Domain Authority of any website using the Moz tool for free using Link Explorer. Just enter your website’s URL and your webpage’s DA score will show automatically.
This tool offers other features, as well, like the number of unique external linking domains (Linking Domains), the total number of keywords for which this website is ranking, and the total no. of unique URL’s linking to a page (Inbound Links), among other metrics.
3.3) How to Use Page Authority
Page Authority is a ranking factor that measures the probability of an individual web page to rank in Google search results. While Domain Authority looks at all pages on one website, Page authority focuses specifically on how well each specific webpage is optimized within your site, so it can give you more insights into where improvements need to be made.
This tool enables you to determine the results of individual pages like blog posts or product pages, to examine which ones might need some additional tuning to get a higher score.
Enter your URL to analyze and select an exact page from the dropdown menu to view the page authority score.
The Page Authority indicator is a great way to prioritize and define the next actions you need in your digital strategy based on pages that have room for improvement.
3.4) How to use Citation Flow & Trust Flow Metric
Citation flow is a new metric created by Majestic’s ACRank system that measures how many sites are linking to your website and determines its credibility based on those citations. It also reflects through link equity which may pass along as well.
Whereas Trust flow is a score provided by Majestic – one of the most popular SEO and link analysis tools. It measures how reliable your links seem based on their quality.
Citation flow and Trust flow metrics are correlated to each other. Using Citation Flow and Trust Flow metrics can give you an overall ratio that will allow for easy analysis of whether or not your site is trustworthy.
To calculate the Trust Flow ratio you merely do the following calculation: Trust Flow / Citation Flow = Trust Ratio
Note: If the ratio value is greater than 1 then the site has links from trustworthy citations and is a good site to outreach to for your client. If it’s less than 1 then it’s considered a poor website.
3.5) How to use Referring Domains & Backlinks metric
Referring domains and backlinks are both important for a good ranking in search engine results. A link from another website to yours is called a “backlink”; it’s an incoming hyperlink that directs traffic towards one of your web pages.
These “backlinks” (linking outwards) signal to Google themselves when they detect such behavior taking place within their algorithms – leading them higher up on page rankings.
Links from websites with high authority to yours can help improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Marketers use these backlinks as an opportunity for increased traffic, which could translate into more sales and customer leads.
To Check Referring Domains & Backlinks there are many SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Majestic. One of the most useful is the referring domains report provided by SEMRush.
In SEMrush head to Backlink Analytics Enter your URL and your competitor’s URL (Incase if you want to compare each other’s score) to analyze and select the exact page or root domain from the dropdown menu to view then click search to view both the metrics.
3.6) How to use Keywords Ranking metric
This seo metrics is a fairly straightforward one. Monitoring your ranking changes is an important part of improving site rankings. As you work towards bettering the search engine visibility for keywords that are vital to business success, it makes sense that you’d want to monitor how your rankings for those keywords change.
If you’re looking to get an idea of where your business stands, manually searching for the keywords is a great way. Simply enter them into Google and see what comes up!
Though above that, you can get a better thorough look at your rankings using a tool like SEMrush.
Head to the Organic Search Positions report, you’ll see an outline of all of the keywords your site ranks for, as well as the positions in which it ranks.
4. Conclusion
The process of SEO starts with one essential measurement: Your results. If you want to know whether your strategy is working, what kinds of keywords are resulting in high ranking for certain sites, and how those numbers may change over time—tracking metrics like organic traffic, Domain Authority score, no. of backlinks, etc., will help provide insight into where improvements can be made moving forward so they’re still achievable goals rather than impossible ones.
Fortunately, tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, SEMrush, and Ahref’s make this tracking fairly easy.
So if you’re willing to get a precise idea of how your SEO efforts are working, start tracking your SEO metrics now.
To know more about SEO, CSS, Angular, Elementor, and other tech-related kinds of stuff visit our Blog.
Other SEO Metrics to Know
With so much data available to track, it’s irresistible to view everything as a KPI to get a fuller picture. But it becomes a very tedious process to track all of the metrics. Here are some metrics you should either ignore or take a look at it later
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after visiting just one page. It means they didn’t click any internal links to view other pages on our website, and considering
site-wide average as an SEO metric isn’t a good idea because that can have different meanings with no concrete insight into how high or low it ranks compared against competitors’ websites in terms of traffic sources.
Pages crawled per day
Crawl rates – no. of crawls per day of the website, so if your site is indexed quickly and easily by the search engine crawlers then you have better odds of achieving a higher rank on SERPs.
In Google Search Console, you can see how many pages Googlebot crawler crawls every day, you can check this by going to Settings > Crawl stats.
Exit rate
As the term implies, exit pages are the final page your visitors check before exiting your website.
The top exit pages of your website are where most visitors drop off, so it’s important to track them. These areas can be tracked by looking at the google analytics for these links on various web browsers and devices that people use when they leave a site—this will give you insight into what might have caused them to leave the site.
Alexa Rank
Alexa Rank (AR) is a metric developed by Amazon and is a coarse measure of a website’s popularity compared with other websites on the Internet. Considering the number of unique visitors and the number of pages viewed on each visit.
Indexed URLs
Number of URLs for given domain in index (these are NOT backlinks), but instead URLs belonging to given domain or subdomain: this metric is good as an indication of domain content scope.
Referring IPs
Number of referring IP addresses provided by Majestic. A Referring IP refers to an IP address which hosts at least one website that has links to the given target URL or Domain. Many domains, (websites), can be hosted on one IP address.