SEO is not an easy process indeed. There are many things you need to know about search engine optimization in order for your website to achieve success and good ranking on search engines.

It is hard for one person to simply do all of it at once, but as soon as you get used to all of the complications it comes with, you will start to manage it better. Before we start you should know why your business needs SEO.

To begin with, you need to keep your eyes on the SEO metrics. Metrics give you a clear visual on how your website is going (statistics, ranking, views, etc.) and the level your website is, compared to your competitors.

If you are a website owner then these 5 important SEO metrics will make it easier to track your website’s overall success.

The 5 Most Important SEO Metrics

1. Page Speed

Page speed is a very important factor when it comes to winning visitors. A reader has average patience of three seconds when it comes to a page loading and opening. This factor determines if your page will be able to rank high or not.

Google PageSpeed Insights is the best way to see whether or not your page is slow. This SEO metric shows if you have a good website. It also shows different ways you can improve things on your website to increase your speed if your speed results are low.

Keep in mind that if your website has medium speed but really important and rich content, then the page speed factor might not really be a big problem. Only websites that are really slow on speed have a major problem.

2. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is nothing else rather than the number of visitors that have viewed your page. If you are clear on how SEO works on this aspect then you will know how important organic traffic is.

It is the prior goal for every optimized website to get views organically (this means not including the PPC method). Organic traffic is an SEO metric tool that gives you the advantage to see how many views your website got and the popularity of your website landing pages.

If you want to see how the popularity of your landing pages is going then go to Google Analytics and go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages and click on the Organic traffic section.

For finding out how many views your website got then at Google Analytics go to Acquisition > All traffic > Channels > Organic Search.

Comparing your data often, for example, month to month or year to year it will be easier for you to understand if your website’s organic views are going well or not.

3. SERP Domination

People that are new to SEO may think that the best thing to prioritize ranking at number one on Google SERP. Surely there is nothing wrong with ranking at number one. What is wrong is prioritizing it.

If you want to truly understand what we mean let us take an example. Imagine that you rank number one in Google SERP and get 50 organic views per day by using a relevant keyword. But in the meantime, you also rank number five on google SERP for using another keyword. Even though you are ranked fifth by that keyword, it manages to bring an average of 300 organic views per day.

So which ranking is best for your website, the first ranking or the second? This answer is shown clearly by the big difference in views. This is the primary reason you need to focus on the dominance of SERPs you are likely to rank in successfully, rather than just focusing on ranking higher.

4. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate of a website shows if a reader did not take any action when coming across your website. This does not mean that you should always be concerned when the bounce rate is high. It all depends on what the users have come across through your website.

Let us take an example. If you post a blog content that just gives out information to readers and your bounce rate is very high (80%) then that means that the reader just clicked your content, read the information they needed and left. This is not a bad thing.

Although if you get a high bounce rate on a checkout page then this could mean that readers are not interested in you. Comparing different bounce rates on different content you upload can give you a clear representation of what best works for you and what patterns you should follow in order to avoid a high bounce rate.

Keep in mind that a bounce rate is not about how much time a user spent on your page. Bounce rate shows if users left your website, going to another competitor website.

5. Organic CTR

CTR is an SEO metric that mainly relies on the position of the SERP. It shows you the number of users your website popped up and what percentage of them actually clicked on your website.

You can find out about CTR on Google Search Console at Search analytics. If you find that the percentage of people clicking on your page is quite low then it is best to change the Meta description tags and the Meta title.

You can try out new ones and see which one best works and gives you the results you want.

Conclusion

There are many SEO metrics to take into consideration. There are also many articles written to give you advice on the best SEO metrics. Unfortunately, they are usually complicated and might confuse readers, giving them a bad impression as if SEO is too complicated.

The best thing to do in order to not give up and have a higher chance of your website gaining success is to start from the basics. We have mentioned five basic SEO metrics that will help you understand how it works efficiently.

Mastering the knowledge of these will lead you to understand more complicated metrics in the near future.