The Top 5 Metrics to Measure Your SEO Success

As a digital strategist, you have developed an SEO strategy in one form or another. Yet, you might be asking yourself if you are doing it right. How do you measure if your SEO strategy is actually working? Have you set and reviewed your SEO metrics?

In any brand or business strategy, setting and measuring metrics are good practices to ascertain if your performance is on track or not. An example of a SEO metric is website visits. This metric will tell you if you are doing something right about your website content quality or relevance based on the number of visits.

Metrics gives you the clarity on the work that your brand needs to focus on. But sometimes, determining what metrics to measure can be a rabbit hole. To give you a headstart on the ones that can make a difference in your SEO strategy, here are five (5) metrics that you should monitor:

1. Search Engine Ranking

The ultimate goal of SEO is to rank higher on search engines. The logic follows that if you are on the top results, people are more likely to click and visit your site. As the saying goes, the best place to hide a dead body is in the second page of Google search results. Use good ranking trackers like Ahrefs and SEO PowerSuite and gauge your average website position for certain search terms that you are trying to rank.

2. Organic Search Traffic

The main reason why brands do SEO is to get organic search traffic. Tracking the traffic you get from organic search will tell you multiple things; (1) if the content that you are sharing is worth any audience’s time, (2) if the keywords you are using are actually helping, and (3) if your strategy is effective. You can use a tool like Google Analytics to measure your organic search traffic.

3. Quality of Backlinks

Backlinks are links from one website leading to your website. Backlinks provide a passive boost to your search traffic over time, and it helps search engines know if you have authority over a certain niche. The more backlinks you gain – the more websites refer to your website  – the more authority you gain as a brand.

The trick is to get more quality backlinks. Aim for quality rather than quantity. It’s better to have 10 backlinks from good websites (the likes of news publishers and government websites) than 100 from sketchy ones that are full of low-quality content. Use tools like Semrush and Moz to track what websites are linking to you.

4. Organic Conversion

Conversion will always be an objective for any brand. The amount of organic traffic that you get is great, but what you are really after is organic traffic that converts and translates into leads or sales. Understanding if your traffic converts will let you know what invest in both your content and link building strategy.

5. Traffic per Device

It’s important to know where your organic traffic is coming from. The Philippines is a mobile-first country. Make sure your strategy takes this into consideration plus the other types of devices. Moreover, discovering what devices your visitors are using will allow you to create specific types of content for them.

Of course, there are still a handful of metrics to monitor. The five (5) metrics above are good ones to start with. The only way you will be able to actually see if your strategy is successful is through constant monitoring.

If you want to upskill or reskill in SEO and content marketing, learning the ins and outs from strategy creation, execution, and measurement, we invite you to attend the CDM Content Marketer Track.