SEO is a great way to market your business organically. Measuring this SEO performance gives you insight into how your organic strategy is doing and where you may need to improve to see more effective results.
There are many different ways to measure SEO and using the right metrics and tools can make your decision-making more effective.
Tracking your SEO performance is crucial, but having the right strategy in place is just as important. Our expert SEO services in Liverpool help businesses achieve higher rankings and sustained growth.
Follow this guide to know how we measure SEO effectively and push your website in the right direction.
Important SEO Metrics to Track
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic relates to the number of website visitors that come to your website organically. There are different types of organic traffic including organic social media traffic, however, in most instances, organic search traffic is the metric that you will be looking at.
Looking at organic traffic can show how well your web pages are performing and often which keywords are bringing in the traffic to your website.
How to Monitor Organic Traffic
There are a few ways that you can monitor organic traffic. Straight out of the box, Google’s own tools are often the best to go with.
Google Analytics
Head to Google Analytics > Reports > Engagement > Landing Page Tab.
Select add a comparison.
To build the comparison you can choose to narrow down the results by using the following conditions:
Dimension = Session Default Channel Group
Match Type = Exactly Matches
Value = Organic Search
Once you have applied this comparison, you will be able to see the organic traffic that land organically on individual pages.
This can be broken down by:
- Sessions = A group of user interactions on your website within a given time frame.
- Users = Individual visitors who come to your website.
- New Users = Users who have never been to your website before.
- Conversions = A set of defined events that have been marked as a conversion.
Looking at GA4 sessions and Users will allow give you a reliable indication of your organic traffic on a page by page basis and will highlight what percentage of these visitors have gone on to complete a conversion.
Note: If your goal is to rank higher in local search results, monitoring your local search visibility is key. Our specialised Local SEO services ensure your business appears where it matters most—right in front of local customers.
We have many clients across the whole North West and our SEO services in Wirral are designed to improve business visibility in Wirral and all the areas around.
Google Search Console
Head to Google Search Console > Search Results.
From here you can see a huge selection of great insights. Using the queries tab, you can see the keywords driving clicks and impressions. You can also monitor the click-through rate of these search terms and the average position.
If you then select the pages tab, you can see how individual pages are performing as well. You can further refine this by selecting individual pages and navigating back to the queries tab. Here you can see the keywords that are driving traffic to these pages.
Google Search Console is a very useful tool to understand which search terms are driving traffic to your website. However, you should be cautious that the data sets for Search Console are not as thorough as GA4 so there will be some discrepancies between clicks and visitors.
See our top 10 free SEO tools accessible to everyone for tracking your website performance.
Keyword Rankings
Better keyword ranking often means more organic traffic and better SERP visibility. However, this also depends on search volume and search intent.
At Blaze, we put together a list of priority keywords that target the goals of the business to drive growth in the way that you want.
So, if you are an ecommerce website, you should monitor priority keywords that you want to drive traffic to your collection pages.
Let’s say you are a specialist noise-cancelling headphone manufacturer for musicians, you might want to monitor the following keywords:
- Headphones for musicians.
- Best studio headphones.
- In-ear headphones for musicians.
We recommend not overcomplicating this and being strict with what you select. Unless you are a large business with thousands of products and services you may only need to focus on 50-100 keywords.
How to Monitor Keyword Rankings
Google Search Console does show the average position of your keywords, however, this can often be misleading and time-consuming to search for each keyword.
A more efficient way to monitor specific keywords is to use a keyword ranking tool such as SEMRush or SE Ranking. These tools will check the search results daily and you can set search conditions such as:
- Search Engine.
- Location.
- Device Type.
With these tools, you can group keywords together and look at the overall performance of your specific campaigns on a day to day basis.
SERP Visibility
SERP visibility is often referred to as search engine market share. It relates to the percentage of how much real estate your website shows on search engines.
Different tools use different metrics, but as a standard, it usually takes into account your keyword ranking, SERP ad placements and featured snippets.
Without creating your own tool to monitor SERP visibility you will need to use a specialist SEO tool to monitor this.
How to Monitor SERP Visibility
SE Ranking
With a tool like SE Ranking, you can discover your SERP visibility by monitoring priority keywords for your SEO campaigns.
Once you have set up SE Ranking, head to Projects > My Competitors > Visibility Rating.
Here you will be able to see how you compare to your competitors and other key insights like your traffic forecast, how many keywords they rank for and how many backlinks they have.
This will give you actionable insights into where you can improve your own website to take up more of the search results.
SEMRush
SEMRush offers a similar tool. Head to SEO > Keyword Research > Position Tracking > Landscape.
This will show you your top keywords, as well as which keywords have improved and which keywords have dropped.
Website Authority
Website authority is a bit of a vanity metric and is often given too much thought when it comes to SEO.
However, can show you how you are improving over time and can often give you an idea of the general health of your website for search engines.
Conversion Rate
Conversions are different for many different businesses. Ecommerce sites may want more sales, lead gen sites want more leads and information sites might want more newsletter signups.
When looking at conversion rates, it is important to be realistic. Don’t expect to see 40% conversion rates when your site is currently converting at 1%.
As an average, conversion rates on ecommerce sites are around 2.5%-3% so be realistic and be prepared to test how different things work.
How to Monitor Conversion Rates
To monitor conversion rate, the easiest way is to set up conversions in GA4. Once this is set up and your events are collecting data, you will be able to see the conversion rate of these events by heading to GA4 > Engagement > Landing Page.
Here you will be able to see the session conversion rate. If you cannot see this you may need to add it to the report. To do this, you will need to:
- Go to Customise Report.
- Add Session Conversion Rate to the metric tab.
- Click apply and save the report.
You will now be able to see the session conversion rate by landing page here.
Backlink Growth
Backlinks are a fundamental part of any SEO strategy. Backlinks give off trust signals to search engines which can give you more authority and better topical rankings.
With an active backlink strategy, you would expect to see growth over time and by monitoring this, you can track how many backlinks you have as well as referring domains.
While it may seem like a great idea to go and buy a load of backlinks to speed up the process, Google has been penalising websites for what seems like a millennium for buying backlinks like this.
How to Monitor Backlinks for SEO
There are many tools to monitor backlinks for SEO. One of the best ways is with SEMRush.
Head to SEMRush > Link Building > Backlink Analytics
From here, you can see the number of referring domains, backlinks and much more useful data. You can see backlinks you have lost as well as links that may be returning a 404 error.
Track your SEO with the right Tools
We’ve talked about a few tools while discussing how to track SEO for effective decision-making. Here are a few of our favourite tools that should be part of any SEO’s arsenal.
Search Console
Google Search Console is one of the best tools to find actionable insights for your SEO strategy.
The tool is free and offers Google search-specific data that shows you how your website is performing and how customers are finding you.
With just a few steps you can set up Search Console but it will take a few days to pull in data for your website.
Search Console is also the home of the Google indexing request, so whenever you create a new page or update old pages, you can request that Google take a look at it from here.
While there are some limitations to Google Search Console data, it offers great insights into your search performance and you can see other key metrics like backlinks and error pages.
Analytics
Analysing your website traffic and user behaviour is crucial to understanding where your pain points are and how you can improve your performance for key pages.
Google offers GA4 a free platform to monitor your site traffic. However, ever since the GA4 push in 2023, there have been an increasing amount of issues with the reliability of this platform.
If you need something more reliable and more in-depth, there are many other options available to monitor your website traffic. However, be warned these platforms can be extremely expensive.
SEMRush
Tools like SEMRush are a great all-around tool to understand different aspects of SEO performance.
While these tools can be expensive, they offer valuable insight that can help you direct and prioritise your SEO strategy.
A stand-out feature of SEMRush is the ability to check competition and look for keyword gaps and backlink gaps. These can help you understand where they are getting their traffic and if they have any associations with other websites.
A great place to find easy targets for your outreach campaigns.
Local Falcon
Local Falcon is a bit more of a niche tool but it can help you understand how your Google My Business profile is performing and it offers insight into how you can improve to be seen more on Google Maps pack.
With Local Falcon, you can set your area, add multiple touch points and gather insights into how well your website is showing on Google.
The tool is particularly useful if you are a local business that serves local customers and regions. It is a great way to target your content and be seen by highly relevant customers.
Blaze Media Guide to Monitoring the Success of SEO
There we have it, a few simple ways of monitoring your SEO strategy to ensure you are moving in the right direction.
As always with SEO, it takes time, but with a consistent strategy, you will be able to see your websites moving in the right direction and create actions based on data-driven insights.
If you need help with your SEO strategy, get in touch with Blaze Media today and our SEO team will be happy to help.