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11 Critical SEO Metrics You Need To Track

If you’re in the business of SEO, then you know how important it is to track metrics. You need to be able to see where your efforts are paying off and what needs improvement. This is especially true for those of us who have been doing SEO for a long time, or even just starting out! If you haven’t already given thought about what kind of data might be helpful for your website’s success over time, then these 15 different types of metrics will help get things started:

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic is the number of visits to your website that come from search engines, rather than paid advertising. The important thing to note here is that organic traffic doesn’t mean you should ignore paid advertising. In fact, a strong ecommerce site can be completely reliant on organic search traffic without losing sleep over it.
It’s also important to remember that although Google has been the king of organic search for years now (and will likely continue to be until something comes along to challenge them), other major players like Bing and Yahoo still have their own algorithms in place—and if you aren’t optimizing for these platforms as well then your site could suffer from poor performance or even disappear out of thin air!

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing it for less than one second. It’s a metric that can have a big impact on your rankings, and it’s important to track if you want to improve your SEO strategy.


Bounce rate is a website’s indication of how many people leave the page after visiting it once, compared with how many people came through on their first visit. The higher this number is (the more bounces), the more likely it will be that Google will penalize you in search results—and not necessarily because you’re doing anything wrong per se but simply because they think people aren’t interested enough in what they have at hand right now! So if you see too much of those red “Page Not Found” errors popping up all over your site or blog posts being detected as duplicates by Googlebot then chances are high that this metric needs some work done on its behalf too…

Return Visits

Return visits are a metric you can use to see how well your site is performing. It’s calculated by dividing the number of unique visitors who returned to your site within a set period of time.
The metric is important because it shows how many people are coming back to your site, which helps with SEO performance metrics like bounce rate and organic search traffic.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session is a good indicator of how long users are staying on your site. It’s also a good way to measure engagement, and it can help you determine whether or not your content is engaging.
In other words: if there are lots of pages being viewed but no one is clicking any links (or even just reading the first paragraph), then that’s not good for SEO!

Visitors To Leads/Conversions

You can track visitors to leads/conversions by using Google Analytics or any other tracking software.
This data is extremely valuable because it helps you improve your SEO strategy and ensure that your website is attracting the right type of traffic.
A conversion is when someone takes an action on your website after being directed there by a search engine result page, such as visiting a specific webpage or filling out a contact form.
You’ll want to measure how many people complete each action (submitting an online form, purchasing something) and then compare these numbers over time so that you can see if they’re increasing or decreasing over time—this will give you insight into whether or not improvements need to be made within different areas of your site’s functionality

Total Linking Root Domains (Backlinks)

Backlinks are the most important ranking factor.
You can find out how many backlinks you have by using a tool like Ahrefs or Moz, or by checking your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority is a score that predicts the strength of a website. It is calculated by Moz, and it’s based on a variety of metrics.
Domain Authority works like this: If you have 10 links pointing to your site, Domain Authority will tell you how many other sites got those first 10 links.
The higher your domain authority, the more authoritative your site appears on Google because search engines trust them less than other websites with lower DA scores or fewer backlinks from trusted sources like Google News or Wikipedia pages about similar topics (which are known as “authority.”)

Social Signals

Social signals are a good indicator of how trustworthy your content is, how popular it is and how much traffic you can expect. They also show the number of people who will share your content once published.
Social signals come in many forms:

  • The number of social shares (i.e., Facebook likes) from followers of other pages on Facebook or LinkedIn that mention you in their posts and/or comments (the more relevant they are to what you’re writing about). This is called “social proof.”
  • The number of Twitter followers who follow others who share information about similar topics as yours; this helps establish credibility with potential customers because they know others trust these accounts enough to follow them as well!

Click-Through Rate From The SERPs

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks to impressions. It’s a good metric to track because it can help you determine how relevant your content is to your audience, as well as whether or not you’re ranking for certain keywords. The higher your CTR, the better!

SEO Rankings

  • How to Measure SEO Rankings
  • Google Search Console has a section for “SEO,” which is where you’ll find the URL of your site. You can use that URL for tracking rankings, but there’s also another way: using Mozcast or SimilarWeb. Both tools provide an easy-to-use interface and allow you to see overall traffic as well as traffic from specific keyword searches over time.
  • How To Track Rankings Over Time
  • The best way to measure long-term progress on rankings is by comparing current performance against previous months/years’ data available through Google Analytics (GA). This will allow you to identify any fluctuations in traffic due to seasonal changes or other factors like changing industry terms—which could mean higher competition than usual during peak seasonality times like summer or Christmas shopping season!

Time On Site

Time on site is a metric that shows how long a visitor stays on your site. It’s important to measure because it can be used to improve your user experience and increase engagement with your content.
Time on Site (TOS) measures the average time that visitors spend on your page, so if they leave before they’ve finished reading all of the text, then you haven’t seen any value in measuring TOS for them.
There are several ways to calculate TOS:

  • Count Page Views – This method counts every single page view of every single visitor across all pages of your site throughout their visit. This means that any time spent during those visits will be counted as being part of this measurement as well. However, this method doesn’t take into account any external factors like search engine optimization or other SEO efforts; therefore it may not give accurate results if those things aren’t happening properly within Google Analytics itself.* Custom Dimension – Custom dimensions allow users access special metrics about individual sites’ performance over time by applying them directly within GA tracking code-based dashboards like AdWords Editor or Google Analytics Professional Plan users get access too when creating custom reports

Some of these metrics are easier to measure than others, but they are all important in the long run.

Metrics are important for a number of reasons. They help you understand your audience and how they use your website, which can inform decisions about content or marketing efforts. Metrics also give you a way to measure the success of your marketing efforts by looking at things like bounce rate, time on site, conversion rate and more.
Some metrics are easier than others to track—for example, some social media platforms allow users who visit their websites from those sites’ platforms (like Facebook) access certain features such as “like” counts or commenting capability—but all of them should be accounted for as part of an overall strategy when it comes time for measuring performance against KPIs (key performance indicators).

In summary, it’s important to keep track of the metrics that matter to your business. These are just some of the ones we recommend tracking on a monthly basis. You can test different combinations and see which ones work best for you. The key is knowing which metrics are most important in order to make sure that they stay on top of their game!
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