1. Average position ranking

   One of the most important SEO metrics that you should keep track of is your website’s search ranking for a particular keyword orset of keyword phrases. For example, if you’re a Toronto law firm and you have created a “Commercial Real Estate Lawyer” landing page, you want to keep track of your landing page’s search ranking for search queries related to “Commercial Real Estate Lawyer”.

   There are different tools you can use to track your website’s search ranking for specific search terms. We typically use Google Search Console and SEMRush. Google Search Console is a free, Google-powered webmaster tool that provides data on your website, such as your search ranking for different search queries, reliability issues, and more. SEMRush is a freemium SEO tool that provides SEO data such as a list of websites that appear on search results for a specific search term, and a website’s search rankings for different keywords.

2. Organic Traffic Conversion Rate

   In addition to boosting your website’s search ranking and gaining more website traffic, you want to look at the quality of the traffic you’re bringing in from Google search results, commonly known as organic traffic. One way of assessing the quality of your organic traffic is by looking at your conversion rate, which is the percentage of organic traffic converted on your website. A conversion could be a form submission, phone call, or online purchase. If you’re bringing a ton of organic traffic to your website but the conversion rate is minimal, you can look for optimization opportunities to improve your landing page, quality of your organic traffic, or keywords you’re optimizing for. If you’re bringing a lot of organic traffic but very few visitors are converting, your landing page may need improvement, or your keywords may be unrelated, bringing in irrelevant visitors. Looking at your organic traffic conversion rate is a good first step of qualifying your organic traffic and SEO efforts.

3. Organic traffic correlation with conversion

   Another metric you can use to measure the impactfulness of your SEO efforts is to define the correlation between your organic traffic and number of conversions. You can use correlation to see if the number of conversions on your website improves when you gain more organic traffic and if the number of conversions decreases when there’s a drop in organic traffic. This assessment helps you understand the quality of your organic traffic. If the correlation between your organic traffic and number of conversions is positive, meaning that the number of conversions goes up when your organic traffic increases, it means that your SEO efforts are working and you’re bringing quality organic traffic. If the number of conversions remains the same even when your organic traffic is up, it could mean that you aren’t bringing in quality traffic and there are opportunities to optimize your landing pages.

4. Bounce rate

   Bounce rate is the percentage of users who land on a webpage and leave (or bounce)the page without visiting a second page. For example, if 100 visitors land on your homepage and 60 of them leave your website without visiting a second page, your website’s bounce rate is 60%.

   Bounce rate is a good metric for assessing the quality of your website traffic and your website content. If the bounce rate of your organic traffic is significantly higher than your other traffic sources, it is worthwhile to dig in and identify potential problems with your SEO efforts and traffic sources. For example, you can see which landing pages your organic visitors are predominantly landing on to see if there is anything that needs to be adjusted to improve the bounce rate.

5. Geographic Location

   Take a look at where your organic traffic is coming from to see if you’re generating organic traffic from your target locations. For example, if you’re a Toronto-based firm and you’re serving the Greater Toronto market, you want to see if you’re bringing in organic traffic from visitors in Greater Toronto. If a majority of your organic traffic is coming from cities or countries outside of your target market, you want to create a filter in your analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) so that you only capture website traffic data from your target market. Once you have created a filter to only view organic traffic from your target market, you’ll have a more accurate understanding of your website traffic data.

6. Landing page views

   You want to drive organic traffic to your high-value pages such as your product or service pages so organic visitors can make a purchase or submit an inquiry. Look into your website data and see where your organic visitors are landing on your website. If you find out that a majority of your website visitors aren’t landing on your high-value webpages, you’ll want to optimize those pages so they appear on higher search results and attract more organic traffic.

If you have any questions about SEO or want help with your SEO campaigns, book a complimentary discovery meeting with one of our SEO experts and we will be more than happy to help.