The Best Metrics for Analysing your SEO Progress

20/01/2020

Implementing SEO strategies and techniques are very important for your website and its success but how will you know if you are making progress? Monitoring various metrics is also very important for your strategies in order to improve them, focus them and see your hard work paying off.

Here are 4 Metrics you should be analysing to monitor SEO progress:

Domain and Page Authority

Domain and Page authority are great metrics to monitor your website and understand how you rank in comparison to your competitors. Domain Authority (DA) is a score from 1-100 that ranks your website in a similar way to Google, by analysing links, content and other elements of your website. This is also true for Page Authority (PA) but for individual pages on your website, this is because each page’s SEO can be different and can be linked to individually.

This metric is easy to measure using Moz’s chrome extension (a free and paid tool), Mozbar:

As you can see Moz offers PA, DA and the number of links of pages. Therefore, you can use this to analyse your website and your competitors and ask these kinds of questions:

  • How does your website compare?
  • How many links does your website have in comparison?
  • Does their PA differ from their DA?
  • Has your websites DA and PA increased since you implemented SEO techniques?

Therefore, monitoring your websites authority is important to understand if your SEO efforts are paying off and your website is competing well within your niche.

Behaviour

The behaviour of your websites visitors is extremely important to regularly monitor through various metrics:

  • Bounce Rates
  • Conversions
  • Time on Site
  • Page Visits
  • Behaviour Flow etc.

Your visitors behaviour can tell you a lot about your website’s traffic and if they getting what they need from your website. For example, if you have a long blog post but a high bounce rate and people are typically spending 15 seconds on this page, you know they are not reading all of the content. What is keeping visitors on your website or making them leave?

This data gives you hints at changes that need to be made to your website to keep visitors, have repeat visitors, and increase conversions through your SEO strategy.

Search Traffic

As SEO is focused on improving search engine ranking and organic traffic, this is a metric that needs to be monitored. Use Google Analytics or other SEO monitoring tools to analyse your websites traffic:

  • Where is the traffic coming from; organic search, social or direct?
  • What are the demographics of the traffic?
  • The CTR (Click-through rate)
  • Is the traffic from a certain campaign?

If you see your organic traffic increasing, then you know that your SEO strategy is working. The CTR is also a great metric to look at as it is a percentage of clicks from search results in comparison to the impressions made. Therefore, the higher the percentage the better as it shows you are ranking in search results and people are clicking on your result.

Flow Metrics

Citation Flow and Trust Flow are evaluative metrics from Majestic SEO and is a great metric to monitor SEO.

Citation flow is predicting how influential a URL could be according to the amount of links pointing to it.

Trust flow is predicting how trustworthy a page/website is, this is based on the idea that trustworthy sites link to trustworthy neighbours.

So, you need to look at your own websites flow metrics as you are building links and obtaining new backlinks from elsewhere and you need to look at them together. A website with high citation but low trust flow shows it could have use negative SEO techniques and its links are spammy. Therefore, regularly check that your websites citation and trust flow are increasing together.

Time to Get Started

So, with this information you can start monitoring your SEO progress regularly. These metrics show the success or challenges you face in your SEO strategy and areas you need to focus on to continually improve and progress in the future.

Posted in SEO