Google Analytics, Stat Counter and other web analytics software keep crawling around your site content and tracking visitors who visit your web pages to gather real metrics about your website. While certain factors and rankings are beyond a website owner’s control, s/he can easily track, monitor or control other essential metrics to adjudge the output of your painstaking efforts.
Most site owners consider rankings as a pivotal factor responsible for a website’s authority; however, since Google has a profound influence upon these SEO metric, site owners cannot do much about it. Hence, what they can do is focus more on metrics specified below rather than giving too much importance to rankings. Rankings not only compel site owners to misread their website’s success or failure, they provide them with a contrary version of their website’s performance.
Therefore, to analyze your website’s actual performance, you should measure the below mentioned five metrics to ensure continued SEO success:
Note: Prefer using Google Analytics to other web analytics program to understand and follow the terminology in this article.
Organic Search Visits
It’s so very important to keep a close tab on this metric, which undeniably is one of the simplest metrics to follow. Organic Search Visits imply a count of those visitors who visit your website through various search engines. By tracking the info provided by this metric, website owners can have a clear idea about the number of genuine, first time visitors to their web pages and websites.
Number of Keywords via Organic Search
If you want long-tail search traffic, you definitely need to focus on the keywords related data provided by analytics software. Since it is important to do a thorough keywords research, it is always beneficial to understand the exact keywords driving traffic to your site via organic search. In other words, this metric can alone decide the impact that your content marketing strategies and efforts have on your organic search traffic.
Number of Landing Pages via Organic Search
If number and nature of keywords provide you a general idea of kind of visitors that hit your web pages through various search engines using some specific keywords, the landing pages also play a pivotal role in assessing the long-tail reach and overall reach of your web content. Since this metric also relies on organic search, it further allows website owners to have a clear idea about the entry pages they need to focus more to create similar content.
Percentage of Non-Branded Organic Search Traffic
Website owners consider their SEO efforts as sufficient or satisfactory when they get a major chunk of their organic traffic through people who search for your brand specifically. As your business grows, you definitely need to evaluate the percentage of organic search traffic emanating from keywords that are not specific to your brand.
Percentage of Branded Organic Search Traffic
By relying on various online web-marketing tools like Video Marketing, Infographics and Social Media, site owners can attract a definitive reputation for their website on search engines. In other words, it implies the success of your brand recognition efforts. Collectively defined as Brand Signals, the total percentage of brand specific organic search keywords means the reputation or prominence of your brand across or among search results.
Aside from the above mentioned metrics, you should also considering adding other important metrics to your reports, which include:
– Organic Search assisted conversions
– Organic Search conversion rate
– % Increase of Direct Navigation visits
– Bounce Rate for Organic Search
You cannot afford to ignore the fact that proper tracking of your site metrics and having realistic expectations can alone decide the success or failure of your SEO campaign.
