7 SEO Metrics That REALLY Matter: How to Track Them and Why They Matter

What is the MOST important traffic source for website owners? If you said “SEO”, you are 100% correct.

Do SEO is one thing and tracking metrics SEO is ANOTHER.

No matter how much you invest in search engine optimization, you will NEVER improve your rankings if you don't track key search engine optimization metrics. SEO. 

Monitoring of statistics research of your website is the most important thing.

In this guide, you will discover:

• The top 7 most important SEO indicators
• What are they and why are they important
• How to Track These SEO Performance Metrics, and More

Are you ready ? Let's get started!

Table of contents

7 SEO Metrics to Track as a Website Owner

Organic Traffic (aka SEO Traffic)

Organic traffic refers to all visitors and clicks from unpaid search results. This means that organic traffic is FREE traffic from search engines, such as Google or Bing.

Why is this important?

You have a rock-solid SEO strategy if your website generates huge organic traffic. Whether your site receives a similar number of monthly organic visits or it's increasing, it's a sign that Google likes your website.

Organic traffic offers many benefits, including:

• Free traffic
• Highly targeted visitors for your keywords targets
• Better conversions and sales
• Improved organic visibility for your website or brand

How to follow it?

The best way to track your website's organic traffic is to use Google Search Console.

Once you are in Google Search Console, open the “Search Results” report in the “Performance” section of the menu. 

Once you click on it, you will find four main metrics in the report, namely:

• Total clicks (which indicates how many times a user clicked on your site)
• Total impressions (which indicates how many times a user saw a link to your site in search results)
• Average CTR (which indicates the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click)
• Average position (which shows the average position in search results for your site, using the highest position of your website each time it appears in search engine results)

This is what it looks like;

You can filter the data (over the last 3 months, 1 year, etc.) to get specific organic traffic data for your website.

You can also view results by queries, pages, search appearance, devices, and countries.

Looked :

Overall, Google Search Console (GSC) reports will give you ALL the information you need about organic traffic to your website.

Are there other tools to find out the estimated organic traffic of other websites?

You can use free tools like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) , which help you easily track your performance in search results. 

Keyword Ranking

Keyword ranking refers to the specific placement of your web page for a particular query or key phrase in search results.

Why is this important?

Here are some major benefits of tracking your website's keyword rankings in search results.

• The main advantage is that it helps you identify the type of keywords that work well for your website or business.
• Increase your website’s organic traffic and conversions
• Track your website's SEO progress over time
• Make better decisions about your SEO strategy so you can invest more in keywords which generate better results.

How to follow it?

There are many tools you can use to track your keyword rankings.

Ahrefs offers a free keyword ranking checker tool where you can enter your target keywords along with your website URL to check the ranking.

You can easily discover various measures such as:

• Your current keyword ranking on Google
• Domain Assessment (DR)
• URL Rating (UR)
• Number of domains
• Number of keywords
• Backlinks

If you don't want to manually search for your rankings, we recommend trying the Semrush position tracker.

It will monitor your website's keyword rankings and show you the differences in keyword rankings and their current positions. 

Looked :

The advantage of using Semrush is that you can monitor the ranking of your website and your competitors on a daily basis. You can also track any location or device type.

1. The Pro plan costs $129,95 per month, where you can add up to 5 projects, 500 keywords to track, and 10 results per report.
2. The Guru plan costs $249,95 per month, where you can add up to 15 projects, 1 keywords to track, and 500 results per report.
3. Business Plan costs $499,95 per month, where you can add up to 40 projects, 5 keywords to track, and 000 results per report.

Traffic value

Traffic value refers to the estimate of how much you would spend on PPC (paid ads) to rank for these keywords organically. It is calculated by multiplying the monthly organic traffic of each keyword at the respective ranking position by the CPC value. 

Why is this important?

Measuring the traffic value of ALL keywords you rank for in search results has many benefits, including:

• This can help you understand the average ROI of your SEO efforts
• It can help you find the most PROFITABLE keywords for your website.

In a nutshell, traffic value gives you an idea of ​​how much it would cost you to run PPC ads with the exact keywords. 

How to follow it?

One of the best ways to calculate the organic traffic value for your website keywords is to use paid tools like Semrush.

To find out the traffic value of your website, go to Semrush’s “Organic Research” tool and enter your website URL.

It instantly displays the traffic value of your site or domain.

As you can see above, you can easily identify the overall cost of your website traffic from Semrush. 

It shows you the estimated average monthly cost to rank for organic keywords in Google Ads. Our blog traffic cost is $21, which means we would have to pay over $400 per month for Google ads to get the same level of traffic. 

Luckily, we have NEVER spent $20/month on our website content. The overall return on investment is therefore excellent. This is the MAIN reason why most website owners prefer SEO because it generates a better ROI in the long run.

Website Health Score

Website Health Score shows you the SEO score based on issues and errors from all crawled pages on your website.

It is usually calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the best possible rating for a website. The website health score is based on a number of factors, including the following:

• Broken links
• HTTPS and crawling issues
• Mobile-friendliness
• Content quality and more

Here's the thing: if your website has a health score of 90 or higher, it's considered in excellent health.

Why is this important?

So why should you care about your website’s SEO score (or health score)? Here are some reasons;

• Although a website's health score is NOT a ranking factor, it is a great way to find and fix issues on your site to improve organic rankings.
• You can provide the best user experience with a better health score
• You will eventually improve your search traffic with fewer SEO issues on your site

How to follow it?

There are many tools that help you quickly discover your website's health score.

We recommend Semrush, which scans your website for over 140 technical site health and SEO issues.

Simply create a project on Semrush's site audit tool. Then it will crawl ALL pages of your website and give you an in-depth review of its health score.

This is what it looks like;

As you can see, the Site Health Score of our website is 88 out of 100, which is decent. The Semrush site audit report shows you several important things;

• Overall Site Health Score
• Explore pages with health issues and broken issues
• Exploration capacity
• HTTPS issues
• Web Essentials
• Site performance
• Internal links, markup score and more

Go and try our Semrush site audit once and check the health score of your website. If your website has a low health score (below 70), this indicates that you need to immediately address some critical issues within your site to improve its search rankings.

Referring domains

Referring domains refer to ALL domains that link to your website. For example, if your website contains a backlink from the Forbes website, then it is considered a referring domain.

Why is this important?

There is a difference between referring domains and backlinks. A website can have any number of backlinks from the same referring domain, but it only counts as ONE referring domain.

This is why referring domains are often considered BETTER than backlinks. 

Your website's authority increases if you get 100 backlinks from 100 different domains rather than getting all of those links from a single domain (or website). It's that simple.

How to follow it?

There are many tools that can help you track referring domains, including Ahrefs, Semush, Moz, etc.

This is what it looks like on Semrush;

As you can see, Semrush offers a specific tool called “Backlink Analytics”, which helps you easily track your referring domains. It also gives you backlink metrics, such as:

• Total number of backlinks of a domain
• Monthly visits
• Estimated organic traffic
• Total number of outgoing domains and more

Organic CTR

Organic click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on a search engine result. Although organic CTR is NOT a ranking factor confirmed by Google, it plays a HUGE role in your website ranking.

Why is this important?

Here are some of the main benefits of improving your website's organic CTR:

• The higher your organic CTR, the more people click on your website links on Google, which ultimately generates more traffic.
• Google increases your keyword rankings if your website listing attracts more clicks during searches.
• It improves the overall visibility of your website in searches 

Your website's organic CTR depends on how well you create your page titles and meta descriptions. Because these are items that are displayed in search results for a search query or keyword.

The Semrush study reveals that the #1 position search result gets an average of 27,6% clicks!

How to follow it?

You can analyze the CTR of your own pages and queries in Google Search Console under the performance report.

Here's what it looks like (from Google Search Console);

As you can see, our average CTR in search results is 1,3% over the last 28 days. You can also use date filters to see what the average CTR is for your site.

Return on investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) refers to the amount of money you get back from your investment. 

Why is this important?

Most people spend thousands of dollars on SEO but don't know how to track their performance. This is why calculating SEO ROI is extremely important.

Here are some of the benefits of tracking SEO ROI:

• This will help you determine if your SEO expenses are justified. What's the point of spending thousands of dollars without knowing the results?
• You can identify which SEO activities are most effective for your business so you can double your investment in areas like content creation, link building, or website design.
• You will know what works and what doesn't.
• Importantly, if your website generates a positive ROI, you can increase your SEO budget (which ultimately helps you generate even more traffic and sales).

How to follow it?

Tracking the ROI of your SEO efforts is NOT difficult, but it's not easy either.

For what? Because you may be investing money in SEO tools, content creators or in-house SEO agencies to get results. Sometimes it takes a few months or years to achieve the desired SEO results.

So… we want to simplify it by giving you a concrete example.

For example, if you spend $10 on SEO over the course of a year.

And… if you get a 20% increase in organic traffic to your website and $50 in additional sales.

It is calculated using a simple mathematical formula which is:

SEO ROI = (value of organic conversions – the cost of SEO investments)/cost of SEO investments.

Your ROI for SEO is then calculated as follows:

• ($50 – $000) / $10 = 000% 

This means that for every $4 spent on SEO, they saw a $1 return. If you're happy spending $4 and getting $XNUMX in return, you can increase the budget, keep the same budget, or try other channels, such as paid ads.

It's just an example. The REAL ROI of SEO can vary depending on a number of factors, such as:

• The niche you are in
• Targeted keywords
• The number of pages to create and manage
• The quality of SEO work
• The number of backlinks needed to rank #1 for related searches and the list goes on

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SEO Metrics FAQ

Here are some FAQs about SEO metrics and SEO.

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Final Thoughts on KPIs and SEO Metrics

Whatever SEO metrics you follow, make sure you use a reliable SEO tool. We HIGHLY recommend SEMrush as it offers over 55 tools under one roof.

Remember that SEO is a long-term process, so it's important to track your progress over time. If you're not seeing the results you want, change your SEO strategy by doing DIY SEO or hiring a professional.

So, what do you think of the SEO performance metrics shared above? You have more questions ? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.