10 Most Important SEO Performance Metrics for Small Businesses

Have you set up your digital marketing team? Have you set up your SEO strategies? But, did you check whether your strategies are working or not? Mmm, probably, not.Many businesses forget to analyze their SEO strategies once they have been set up. However, don’t make that mistake. Not analyzing your strategies will not only cost you time but will cost you financially as well. It will help you develop your website performance. SEO performance metrics will help you identify which tactics will work for your business and which don’t. One of the major benefits of analyzing SEO performance metrics is that it helps you avoid wasting unnecessary money and time on tactics that are not earning you any profit.Table of Contents

• 1. Organic traffic
• 2. Click-through-rate
• 3. Exit Rate
• 4. Local SEO Visibility
• 5. Average Page Load Time
• 6. Core Website Vitals
• 7. Backlinks
• 8. Ranked Keywords
• 9. Crawl Errors
• 10. Bounce Rate

1. Organic trafficThe whole purpose of planning the SEO strategies is to get maximum organic traffic. Tracking organic sessions regularly will help you get the best SEO performance metrics. It will determine your rankings by showing your monthly increase in visitors.Organic traffic provides you the accurate result that your efforts are quite fruitful, and they are gaining more visitors, leads, and conversions, even for the keywords that you weren’t targeting.2. Click-through-rateYour brand’s click-through rate refers to the percentage of people who visit your website after clicking on your website link from the SERPs. It shows how well you’re listing is appealing to your visitors and how it catches their attention.If your CTR is low, it means that your title or Meta description is not attracting visitors or your content is not relevant for the people who are looking for something that are not in your niche. Therefore, it is essential to monitor your CTR in order to improve your engagement.3. Exit RateExit pages are the last pages that your visitors check before leaving your website. Exit pages mean that the content of that page makes the visitors lose interest in your website. Thus, it is important to track your exit pages to determine what went wrong.You need to ensure that your page layout and content structure are easy to understand, include internal links and CTA to lead visitors to relevant content and pages, and add visual content to make your page more appealing and attract visitors.

Also Read:- 7 Tips to Improve your Startup Business with SEO

4. Local SEO VisibilityIf you have local SEO campaigns, you need to track specific measures to ensure your organic traffic is coming from the right audience. You can check your local SEO visibility by tracking Google maps rankings, Google my business insights, and session location.  You can easily get in touch with digital marketing services for small businesses to boost your business visibility on search engines.5. Average Page Load TimePage loading time is one of the most important factors for a successful website. If your website is taking too much time to load, visitors may abandon your website and move to the next one. As per Google, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, the high chances are people will abandon it. Ask professional SEO services and experts to control the page loading time of the website.6. Core Website VitalsIt’s not just backlinks and keyword optimization that affect Google’s ranking of your site. Instead, Google wants your website to be extremely user-friendly. Google’s AI-based RankBrain algorithm measures your website’s interaction with users.This is why they’re incorporating user engagement metrics into their algorithm more heavily.

Also Read:- SEO for Start-ups – An Ultimate Guide for Website Optimization

7. BacklinksSEO performance is still influenced by backlinks, even when on-page factors are important.It is most likely that the page with more backlinks from higher-quality domains will win between two pages with similar on-page metrics, such as bounce rate, time on site, content quality, etc.Monitor how many backlinks and referring domains you receive from your link-building campaigns in order to determine whether or not your search engine optimization efforts are working. Getting more backlinks does not necessarily result in better rankings, but it does show your efforts are paying off.8. Ranked KeywordsA key SEO metric to monitor is keyword ranking.Tracking keyword rankings tells you two things, despite search results rarely being identical between users (thanks to personalization) and 20% of searches being entirely new:• Generally, better rankings for one keyword indicate better rankings overall, especially for long-tail keywords related to that keyword. Your current SEO plan’s effectiveness can be determined by tracking keywords.• Poor keyword selection can result in no improvement in target keyword rankings if your client’s other SEO metrics (such as domain rating and organic traffic) improve. As a result, you should attempt to rank for less competitive keywords first.9. Crawl ErrorsA website must first be able to be read by Google in order to be ranked.If a site has a lot of technical SEO issues, such as broken links and missing pages, Google will have difficulty crawling it. You can’t rank your pages if Google can’t find them.You can keep an eye on your total crawl errors by using an SEO site checker on a regular basis. In turn, this can improve the readability of your site, aiding Google’s ranking process.10. Bounce RateYour bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without taking any action.Search engines consider this metric as a ranking factor as well. In most industries, a bounce rate of 40-60% is considered normal. A high percentage indicates that the page is not relevant to the search query.Look at your Overview report in Google Analytics to identify which pages have high bounce rates and try different approaches to reduce them.That’s all for today.Hopefully, this article will help you gain insights into your business and plan your SEO strategies. However, you can always hire digital marketing specialist to help you with your digital marketing and put you one step ahead in the market.