How To Measure SEO Performance Effectively

First, we will look at the various types of traffic sources, then we will explore the types of SEO metrics you can monitor based on your goals and use all of this to measure the success of your SEO efforts

There are 3 key traffic sources to your website:

1. Direct traffic: are the visitors that typed your URL directly into their browser, or who had bookmarked your site. They can also include untagged links within emails (e.g. from a desktop email application like Outlook), or links from documents that don’t include tracking variables (such as PDFs or Word documents).

2. Referral Traffic: are visitors to your site that come from external links on other websites rather than direct traffic or traffic from search engines. Backlinks contribute to referral traffic.

3. Organic Traffic is visitors referred by an unpaid search engine listing. Organic traffic is another way of saying unpaid search engine traffic or traffic that has come from SEO.

Google Analytics is a free and easy way to measure these traffic sources. These reports can be found in the Acquisitions –> Channels sidebar of Google Analytics.

There are a number of ways you can measure the success of your SEO. Keyword rankings, organic traffic, conversions and sales are the most common.

We’ll now look at these individually, as well as referral traffic and link building KPIs.

Without measuring metrics for SEO, it’s hard to see if progress is being made and whether what you are optimizing is working or not.

Early signs of SEO progress is seen at a keyword level first because you can see a rise in rankings before any traffic, conversions or sales are generated.

SEMRush is the leading tool for competitor keyword research. While SEMRush offers some functionality for free, the majority, including keyword rankings, requires a subscription.
SEOmonitor is another premium tool that offers keyword rankings. They also offer the ability to benchmark how well you are doing against competitors and the tool hooks up to your Google Search Console account, to help find keywords you may have missed.
WhatsMySERP is a quick and free way to check your keyword rankings. While it works most of the time, it can be a little buggy so an alternative free-way to check rankings is the SERPs.com rank checker tool.
Wincher and Pro Rank Checker are both low cost but good quality and dedicated keyword ranking checking tools.

There are a number of paid keyword ranking tools, many of which are part of a bigger SEO tool package. If you are looking for a dedicated keyword ranking tool and not paying for extra features, Wincher provides a good value option.

Let us say, you research 10 pages and average 6 keywords per page. That’s 60 keywords that you are targeting and you will need a way of tracking their performance over time.

Organic traffic: is best measured in a web analytics tool like Google Analytics.

Organic traffic indicates that a visitor has come from SEO, so it’s a good high-level way of reviewing progress.

You can monitor organic traffic for the whole of a website, a section of it or for specific URLs.

Monitoring your SEO traffic is straightforward in Google Analytics. You can do this by:

Accessing Channels from the Acquisition menu and then viewing Organic Search, or
By using the built-in Organic Search custom Google Analytics Segment

Like many of the other metrics you might like to keep a close eye on it on a monthly basis and perhaps even compare it Year-on-Year (from date picker) to get an idea of seasonality.

It is possible to have good keyword rankings and traffic but low or no conversions/goals/sales. This may indicate that the keyword research and SEO strategy was wrong.

Conversions and sales metrics are often considered the most important SEO success metrics as they tend to be the most closely aligned to the business goals.

In Google Analytics, a conversion can be measured through Goals. This can include lead generation e.g. newsletter signups, PDF downloads, brochure requests etc.)

Tracking sales or conversions in Google Analytics usually requires a bit of extra customization your end but it’s really worth it as you can see how well SEO is performing as a whole compared to other traffic sources and its also more granular, such as by seeing what landing pages are organically having the biggest impact on your bottom line.

measuring seo performance

Once set up, monitoring your conversions and sales is straightforward in Google Analytics. You can do this by accessing the conversions menu and by selecting the ”organic traffic” segment.

Referral traffic is an important metric for SEO. It’s a good sign that you are getting the right type of backlinks as people are clicking from them to your website.

Tracking referrals is straightforward in Google Analytics. You can do this by accessing the acquisition menu. If your link building has resulted in relevant backlinks, you should notice that your referral traffic improves over time.

Open Site Explorer is part of the Moz SEO toolset. It’s specifically for link analysis. To get the best out of it, try the following:

Enter the homepage of a website you would like to research to see how many and what backlinks it has acquired. This could be for your own website or a competitor’s e.g. https://www.evo.com
In the Page Link Metrics, review the number of Root Domains and Total Links. The Total Links are all backlinks to the domain you are researching which may include one or many backlinks from the same domain. The Root Domains count is for unique domains only. Often the Root Domain count is a better metric for backlink volume as it’s possible to get hundreds of backlinks from the same domain which would be included in the Total Links and skew the numbers.
Consider changing the following Inbound Links options:
Set Target to “the root domain”. This shows links to the whole domain and not just the URL you entered.
Set Link Source to “external”. This will exclude internal links and only show external links/backlinks.
Set Link Type to “only follow”. This will only show backlinks that pass SEO value.
Review the backlinks that are shown for the domain. Note they are sorted by PA (Page Authority), so according to Moz, you should see the most authoritative ones first.

What SEO metrics to measure will vary from business to business and the most typical are:

Monitoring the rankings of a targeted list of keywords. E.g. 60 keywords for the top 10 URLs (6 keyword / URL)
Monitoring organic monthly traffic and often from comparing to the previous month and previous year
Monitoring the total number of monthly sales and/or conversions e.g.:
Contact form submissions
White paper download
Newsletter sign-up
Number of external links
Total number of root link domains
Total number of backlinks

If you find your SEO efforts are not paying off in the way you would like or have expected, here is a few key questions for each of your SEO activities:

Technical Optimization

Does Google Search Console report URL errors?
Especially look out for URL errors reported for important web pages. If there are errors, understand why those errors are happening. You may need to improve the reliability of your web hosting and/or redirect URLs that have been changed.
Are your key landing pages indexed?
Remember you can use the cache command in Google (e.g. cache:www.url-you-wish-to-check.com) to check if a URL has been indexed. Check that all you important web pages are indexed.
If some are not they may be lacking links (either internal and/or external). Check that you are linking to all your important pages effectively internally. If your website is new, you may need to build up some backlinks to it before search engines decide your content is worthy for indexing.

On-Page Optimization

Have you followed best practice in optimizing keywords into key landing pages?
Re-look at the Keyword Research and On-Page Optimization section of this course. Are you targeting the right keywords and working them effectively into key elements of the page? e.g. working keywords into Title Tags, Headings and the Main Copy.
Have you avoided keyword stuffing?
If search engines feel you are trying to cram in too many keywords and it negatively affects the readability of your content, you may be losing relevancy marks and rankings.

Off-Page Optimization

In order to target competitive keywords, your website needs to have comparable off-page optimization metrics when compared to competitors.

Does your site lack domain authority?
Does your key landing pages lack page authority?
Does your site lack backlinks?

Review the top 5 landing pages you would like to rank and have optimized. Note the main (P1) keyword you are targeting for each. Separately type each keyword into Google and review the top three competitors. How do you compare in Open Site Explorer for Domain Authority, Page Authority and number of Backlinks? If you’re metrics are noticeably lower, you will need to build backlinks to boost your reputation and ranking power. You may also consider targeting less competitive keywords.

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