Know the most important metrics to measure the effectiveness of your website's SEO strategy and discover which indicators do not really contribute to determining the positioning of your online business in search engines.
A SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy aims to help you improve the organic positioning of your website in search engines in order to attract higher quality traffic, obtain valuable leads, and increase the likelihood of converting prospects into customers.
However, as a savvy marketer, you know that it's not enough to just execute an SEO strategy; a crucial step is analyzing the results. And how can you determine if the strategy is effective or not? Through metrics or indicators.
SEO metrics are crucial for tracking results!
Therefore, in this article, Blas Giffuni and Camilo Ramírez will help you better understand the metrics that are relevant for measuring SEO strategies (which they call real metrics) and will also share which indicators are not as important or how some metrics can be complemented to have contextualized data.
Let's get started!
Traffic:
Traffic is a metric that indicates the number of visits your website receives on a monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis depending on how you want to measure it. It also shows how many users enter your website and how many of them are recurring.
But, you should take this metric with a grain of salt. Why? Because as tends to happen with SEO, quality matters more than quantity.
Therefore, you shouldn't worry about the volume of people visiting your website, but rather whether these are the right people for your business, those whom you can solve their problems with your products or services and who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
Therefore, a large number of users visiting your website can be a vanity metric if these visits are not translating into conversions and are not resulting in new customers for your business.
Regarding this point, we want to invite you to see SEO as a go-to-market strategy, as it should strengthen the marketing funnel and, at the same time, support the sales funnel.
What metrics help me assess the quality of my website's traffic?
Growth of micro-conversions or organic conversions from internal website pages.
Percentage or rate of user return.
Which indicator is not relevant for determining the quality of traffic?
The number of pages per visit.
No matter how many pages a user navigates during their visit to your website. If this user does not return, it means that the content you offered did not arouse enough interest to make them want to return or did not help them solve their problems.
On the contrary, if the user keeps coming back, it means that we did something to earn their attention and interest, and that they already recognize us as an authority on a certain topic.
Bounce Rate:
The bounce rate indicates the proportion of users who enter a page and leave without performing an interaction. It measures, in part, your website's ability to retain visitors.
In other words, according to HubSpot, this indicator shows the percentage of visitors who come to your website and, without even clicking, leave the first page. The higher your bounce rate, the less time your visitors spend.
It's a fairly useful metric for reviewing the user experience, but it still needs to be segmented. In other words, look at the metric with a double lens.
When only the overall site bounce rate is reviewed, we are leaving out the analysis of what caused that result. That is, if the bounce rate improved, what action or content caused it, and if it worsened, what caused it.
It is well known that Google is increasingly trying to provide answers to users' searches as quickly as possible so that they can find what they need immediately, thus saving them time and facilitating their lives.
Therefore, labeling a website as bad based on the bounce rate is incorrect. Because what about those users who arrive through the search engine to solve a doubt, quickly find the information they needed on your website, and leave. Does it mean it was a bad visit? No! The user found their answer, and you added value. In this example, the bounce rate is positive.
Keep in mind that Google is testing a functionality for Chrome, where the user searches and a result appears in yellow. That yellow result creates a direct link to the paragraph or part of the URL where the answer to what they are looking for is.
So, if the user enters a website and immediately finds the answer to their need, it is very likely that they will not stay browsing for longer and will leave.
In any case, it is possible to monetize that user. How? By continuing to create quality content.
That user now knows that they found good content on your website and solved their needs. Now, the next time they search the Internet and your website appears in the search results page, it won't matter if you don't occupy the first position. They will probably recognize your brand and give you preference because they already know you have content that serves them. This is a way to create top of mind.
2. Domain Authority:
Domain authority, as defined by HubSpot, is a metric or indicator that "predicts" how likely a domain is to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to its competitors.
It is important to note that Google does not use domain authority as a ranking factor to decide how to rank websites.
Therefore, our recommendation is not to use this metric, since Google has clarified on multiple occasions that they index URLs or pages based on the quality of their content and evaluate how backlinks or external links pointing to your website relate and connect to each other.
Therefore, when looking for backlinks or external links, you shouldn't worry so much about domain authority but rather that it has a contextual relationship with your business and the topics you cover on your website.
Finally, a bit of history: this indicator was initially developed by the MOZ platform and is now used by different SEO tools such as SEM RUSH. However, it is not validated by Google. And, while it is not a very strong or necessary metric, it allows you to evaluate yourself in relation to your competitors to some extent, but take it with a grain of salt.
3.Toxicity Index:
Toxic backlinks are defined by Google as any type of link intended to manipulate PageRank or the ranking of a site in Google search results.
The toxicity index is a metric you should pay attention to because it indicates that certain links come from pages that can give users a bad experience.
Whether they are links from websites that have been compromised by downloading viruses to their users, or stealing information, or they come from sites known as link farms, which actually sell links with the idea of increasing organic traffic but have no contextual relationship or connection and only contribute to cluttering the Internet.
Therefore, we recommend reviewing which websites are generating links to your website and, if they have a high toxicity index, performing a link disavow, also known as disavowing backlinks.
You can also try to communicate, in the first instance, with the webmaster of the domain that has the link pointing to your website and ask them to remove it.
Conclusion:
The first part of this article has concluded! If you are interested in learning more about which metrics are relevant and which are simply vanity metrics, you can continue reading part 2.
