Content is king. Anyone working in the online world, especially the content marketing or SEO field must have heard this saying. However, just creating quality content is not enough for your success. You need to understand the relationship between content marketing and search engine optimization. You need to assess the performance of your content and get a complete understanding of the metrics related to the work. To ease your job, you can check a few common SEO metrics listed below:
- Links – Every SEO professional, who wants to become successful in this field, considers links as one of the most important factors. Not only the webmasters but also Google treats links as one of the three most important ranking factors. Therefore, when considering different SEO metrics, make sure you have high-quality links relevant to your page. However, you should not use any unethical method to increase links. Instead, you can always consider taking assistance from Google Search Console, Majestic, SEMrush Backlink Audit or Moz’s Link Explorer. When selecting link indexing tools for increasing the number of links, make sure to use comprehensive links for your page.
- Site position or ranking – Organic search traffic is something that you need for the success of your website as well as the online business you are promoting with the site. However, for better footfall, you need your site to be ranked among the top searches of any search engine. Even though excellent SEO techniques are required for better ranking, you may find it interesting to know that ranking or your search position is itself considered as an SEO Yet, just concentrating on ranking is not enough. To give a boost to your site, you need to consider other variables like click-through rate, impressions, and organic traffic. To obtain the ranking metrics of your site, you can always use Google Search Console. Apart from that, you may also try using Moz, Searchmetrics or SEMrush Position Tracking tool.
- Organic search results – By focusing on the organic search results, you will not only be able to track the position of the page but also you will be able to devise new strategies for improvising the same. Tracking organic search data is pretty easy as you can do it by using Google Search Console and Google Analytics. The methods to track organic search results are provided step by step. Just follow it and get your job done. Yet, do not just restrict yourself to Google as Bing is equally important.
- Organic Conversion Rate – Almost each and every SEO campaign has the objective of driving a significant number of conversions from visitors. While some get hard conversion in the form of a transaction from an e-commerce store, others have to settle for soft conversions like email signups or anything in between. To make the most of the organic conversion rate, you need to understand whatever you are tracking as conversion and Google Analytics can be of your help in this regard.
- Mobile rankings – Links, organic search, CTR or organic conversion rate have been important metrics right from the beginning. However, mobile rankings are growing immensely popular these days as Google is prioritizing mobile-first index. Therefore, to make your site successful, it is important for you to get content optimized for every mobile browser. To increase your site’s popularity, you need to check the performance of your site across desktops as well as mobiles and make the necessary improvements. When looking for tools to assist you in increasing mobile rankings of your site, go for Google Search Console without any second thought.
- Mobile search traffic – As you are working in an era where mobile users are given more importance compared to the desktop users, you need to analyze your traffic with utmost care. You need to decipher whether it is the desktop users or it is the mobile users, who are forming the major part of the organic search and act accordingly. Here too, Google Analytics can be of your great help as it decodes the behavior of your site, its content, every page and device category in which it is browsed. Just select any particular URL and let the tool do the rest of the work.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages – If you want your site to get loaded instantly and at any place, you just need to use Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is more popularly known as AMP. Professionals who have used this have praised it for providing better user experience and also stronger reader engagement. As AMP is a strong metric for assessing your page, it is important to understand it thoroughly before implementation. Once you get a complete knowledge of the tool, implement it and get break down of the traffic. Yet, to get complete error-free data of AMP and Non-AMP sessions, you need to build an error-free.
- Page Speed – Faster the loading time of your page, higher is the chance of success. Google for a considerable period of time has used page speed as a major ranking factor but it should not be considered with site speed. Page speed refers to page loading speed or the time needed for loading the first byte of any given page. However, site speed refers to the page speed for any sample page of your site. Sites with better page speed are faster to browse and provide access to more pages.
- Crawling error – Just ensuring better content, quality links and higher page speed is not enough. You also need to ensure that your page is error free. Else search engine bots will not be able to crawl through the page and reach a dead end, indicating problems in the page that needs resolving. Frequent crawl errors may make a negative impact on your site and to avoid such problems, you should always monitor your pages at regular intervals. You can also follow Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console for tracking any kind of crawl errors.
- Index status of your page – Indexed status is one of the most neglected SEO metrics. Yet, it is extremely significant in assessing the performance and content engagement of your site. By tracking this data, you will be able to find the URLs search engines indexed or tried to index. With this, you can also find the indexation problems of the site and fix it at ease. Like the above-mentioned metrics, this too can be assessed by using Google Search Console.
- Descriptions/Duplicate tiles – Make sure that your page has unique meta description as well as the title However, checking every page manually might not be a feasible option and you might end up making duplicate tiles even after giving the best efforts. Yet, Google Search Console can assist you in this case as well and improvise your page accordingly.
- Dwelling time – This has become one of the most discussed topics of late and plays a great role in determining the SERPs of your site. The term dwelling time refers to the period for which any visitor is staying on your page before returning. The sites with more dwelling time and lesser bounce rate are considered to have engaging content compared to others.
To conclude, it is right to state that SEO metrics play an important role in determining the success of any SEO campaign. If you want your content to gain maximum popularity, you need to understand SEO metrics and assess your page accordingly.