There’s no point in running any kind of search engine optimization (SEO) campaign without some kind of metrics to measure its success. Without analyzing your performance, you will not be able to truly understand what went well, and what needs to be improved. However, it’s not as simple as “number of sales” or “revenue.” 

While those are important factors, they do not show the whole story, and they can be subject to luck. For instance, if one customer buys an inordinate amount, you might show a good performance, but your strategy may not be built for sustainability. 

You need to be able to drill down and look into various components of your SEO success to get a sense of what will continue to work in the long-term. What’s important can vary from campaign to campaign, and company to company. They can also change over time. However, there are certain metrics that are currently the most important. Here is a guide to the SEO metrics that you should follow in 2021. 

Keyword Rankings

Keywords are one of the most important aspects of any SEO campaign. You can use Google Search Console to track how well your website is doing in regards to your chosen keywords. If you are not ranking high on the rankings with your keywords, then you will need to change them up and try something else. At its most basic, successful SEO needs to attract visitors to your website. The higher your keywords rank, the more visitors they will get. The top ranking can get over 30% of all clicks for that keyword. That is a huge number. If you are not in the top 6, then your chances of success drop dramatically. Once you understand how your keywords are doing, you can then adjust your campaign as needed. 

Organic Traffic Visits

Organic traffic visits might be the most direct measure of how your SEO campaign is doing. While it doesn’t tell the whole story, it does provide a simple number to show how many visitors clicked to your site during the campaign. Everything you do can follow from this simple metric. 

For example, if you are getting a lot of visitors, but not many are converting, then there is an issue on your website somewhere. Through this measure you can also see which keywords are performing well for you. You might have a sense of how well your keywords are ranking, but it’s also important to know if those rankings are leading to visits. If not, then you may have to adjust something. In general, getting a lot of visits to your website through your SEO campaign is a good sign. If you aren’t seeing the sales that you are looking for then you know where to look for improvements. 

Link Metrics

One of the biggest factors for getting good results on search engine rankings pages (SERPs) is having links from other sites to yours. You need to have a robust backlink profile that shows that reputable websites, preferably related to your industry, are linking to your content. This demonstrates to search engines that your website can be considered an authority on a topic, and is a trusted source of information. 

You can easily gain insight into your backlink profile using Google Search Console or through a paid service. If your links aren’t where you need them to be, you can hire a link building company to help improve. Metrics that can be tracked include your total number of backlinks, and a listing of the authority of the domains that are linking to you. This will tell the quality of the links you have, and whether you need to upgrade them. 

Page Loading Speed

Every day, more websites go online, more businesses adopt SEO, and more people access the internet. What does this mean? It means that there is a lot of potential competition, and a lot of choice as to where a user might spend their time online. Page loading speed is another factor that is closely related to search results success. 

The reason for this is simple. If your website takes too long to load, then visitors will click away. It will show search engines that you must not have engaging or relevant content, otherwise you would be keeping those people from leaving quickly. Slow load times also tell the user that your site might be down. 

Generally, you want your page load time to be three seconds or fewer. Otherwise you need to optimize the website to improve. There are several ways to do this, such as changing the size of your images, hosting videos on other platforms and embedding them, and reducing how many redirect actions there are on each page. 

Pageviews Per Visit

When visitors come to your website, there is always something you want them to do. Do you want them to buy something? Sign up for a newsletter? Fill out a survey? Whatever it is, it requires those visitors to navigate your website in the manner you want to end up where you need them to be. 

Measuring the page views per visit tells you if your website flows properly to encourage visitors to click through. If they are staying on one page and not converting, then you may have an issue with website useability. It could signify that it is not clear what you want them to do, or that it is hard for visitors to find where to click to continue navigating. It’s important that you have clear and visible buttons with calls to action so that the visitor knows exactly what to do no matter what page they are. Finding information should be easy, as should landing on your sales page or the page you want them to visit. 

Conversion Rate

This is a basic metric that every business should track. It can tell you how well your website is doing on converting visitors into sales. If you are performing poorly here, then it most likely has to do with some of the metrics already mentioned. Getting visitors to your website with a quality SEO campaign is one thing. Getting them to purchase your products or services, register for your event, or sign up to your mailing list is quite another. 

This is the metric that has the most impact on your businesses bottom line. It directly impacts your return on investment, and will dictate what you do going forward. Often, doing well on the previous metrics mentioned in this article means that you should do well with conversion rates. Everything in an SEO campaign leads to this final number. When reporting to your clients or CEO, they will almost undoubtedly want this high-level metric to get a sense of the overall success of the campaign. 

There has never been more competition when it comes to the digital marketplace. You need a website to properly sell and market your brand, and you need an effective SEO campaign to get visitors to it. You need to have certain metrics to properly measure the success of your campaign. Otherwise, you are just working in the dark. If you don’t know what success looks like, you won’t be able to determine if you’ve found it.