Beginners and somewhat experienced SEOs are usually overwhelmed with data that we don’t know which SEO metrics are the most important to track.
This article will help discover the most essential SEO metric to track rather than focus on the ones you are used to.
Let’s get to it one after another.
1. Clicks
What Clicks mean is how many times people clicked a link to one of your pages from the Search Engines.
Clicks are the most important SEO metrics to track. Why? It is the essence of wanting to optimize your content for Search Engines in the first place.
The best place to track your link clicks is Google Search Console.
Take note of which articles or keywords are getting clicks or not. For articles, not getting enough clicks, try to update them to improve their ranking.
2. Impressions
How many times people see your content on the Search Engine is known as ‘impressions’ in this case.
Usually, impressions are way more than clicks. Expectedly.
When articles are getting impressions, it is a good sign because people can at least see your content on search engines. It simply means the content can rank higher for the specified keyword if some things are in place.
However, as mentioned before, the most important SEO metric to track is Clicks. So, if your article is getting impressions, also take note of how many clicks it gets.
Learn more about how organic impressions work.
3. CTR
CTR simply means Click-Through-Rate – the percentage rate at which people click to view your article out of the number of times they see your content on Search Engines.
In this case, the formula for CTR is Clicks/Impressions X 100.
Read my in-depth guide on CTR to learn how it works.
CTR is a good SEO metric to track because it helps to know how well your content converts on the search engines.
When you observe a page having lots of impressions, it’s always good to check the CTR too to have an idea of how well it converts.
From the SEO point of view, anywhere between 5 – 9% CTR or more is a very good one. 4 % is also decent. 2-3% CTR is fair. However, anything less than 2% CTR needs serious improvement especially when it has to do with web clicks.
4. Queries
Another important SEO metric to track is Queries.
Queries are key phrases that your website already ranks for.
Take note of Keyphrases that have ridiculously low CTR. Look out for Queries that are not the main key phrases on the page they show up for, then you should consider writing new content for those key phrases.
After writing the new content, make sure you link the older content from which you discovered the new key phrase.
Follow this internal linking guide to help you.
In case the Queries are very much relevant to the pages they show up for and cannot stand alone in an article, you should consider adding more of those queries in the content they already rank for.
In addition, you could create more unique images related to the queries and insert these queries in the ALT description of the images.
Follow this image SEO guide for a better understanding.
5. Pages
Always take note of the pages that are fetching you the most traffic from search engines. One way to improve a page’s performance is by looking out for underperforming queries that the page ranks for. Use those queries more, and add relevant images.
In the same manner, observe pages that are not getting enough traffic. Research relevant key phrases, develop them, and add more flesh to such pages.
6. Countries
In case you monetize your site with display ads, it is crucial that you know where the majority of your visitors are based.
The Earnings Per Click (EPC) for tier 1 countries like the United States and the United Kingdom are always higher than those of other countries.
To improve traffic from a particular country, your keyword research is the starting point.
Using 3rd-party SEO tools, you should research key phrases with low SEO difficulty for a country you may have in mind.
Always check back on the ‘countries’ metric to track your progress.
7. Search Type: Video
Videos are getting a lot of attention on search engines in recent years. So, you should have relevant videos embedded in your content.
Apart from the fact that such videos are going to be super useful to your readers, you’ll get more traffic from the videos section of search engines.
In your Google Search Console, by default, you’ll have reports for web searches. But you should also find your metric for video search.
Take note of pages getting the most traffic from video SERP.
You may want to create your own videos and embed them instead of embedding other people’s videos.
Also, you can easily convert your blog posts to videos with this guide. If you monetize your site with Ezoic, you can use Flickify to do this.
Conclusion
All in all, the most important SEO metrics to track are Clicks and CTR. All other metrics are important but they all revolve around them.
Nonetheless, you should still keep track of all other SEO metrics because they give a wider picture of your SEO.
If you found this article useful, also find out if you should follow the advice of SEO ‘experts’, YouTube Channels to learn SEO for FREE, and how to write top-quality blog posts.
