What Happens If You Fail to Monitor These Important Website Metrics
In the world of SEO, hard data is everything. If you want your SEO strategy to work effectively, looking after your website metrics is necessary. It can give you insights into what can go wrong with your strategy, which will help you respond to various issues promptly. Moreover, it’s a great chance to offer a better user experience to your customers. Ultimately, SEO is all about providing the best possible experience to users and keeping up with their needs. Looking after metrics will give you a much better understanding of your visitors and potential customers.
How Website Metrics Can Impact Your Success
Website performance metrics can offer valuable insights, bringing data that can help you get the most out of your website and SEO strategy. Nowadays, businesses rely on high-quality leads that the website has the power to bring. If you’re having issues turning visitors into leads, it can be challenging to identify the problem without hard data.
That’s exactly when metrics come into play: they help you to analyse the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and see whether you’re heading in the right direction. Be sure to choose a great website performance monitoring software for it. Once you have the data, all you have left to do is to make sense of it and take action.
Important website metrics to monitor
Keyword Rankings
With keyword ranking, you can see how your website ranks in the search results for a search query. You probably click the first or the second link when you type in a search request. That’s exactly why you should aim for the first-ranking position — it gives you an advantage.
If you want to improve your traffic, keyword ranking is among the first website analytics metrics to track. You should clearly know what pages should be refined to improve the overall result. For this, you can use tools such as the SE Ranking rank checker, which will help you see how the website’s pages rank for specific keywords, compare their position in relation to competitors, and analyse the overall ranking dynamics. Analysing keyword ranking positions allows you to understand the main trends on your website and prevent any critical drops.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is a great indicator of how well your overall SEO strategy works. It defines how many people find your website organically through search engines, not through paid advertisements. Stable and continuously growing organic traffic indicates that your content is valuable for the audience and your SEO efforts are working. You can use Google Analytics to clearly understand your traffic sources and information about who your visitors are and where they come from. This way, you receive valuable insights that can help you build your strategy further.
Core Web Vitals
Google announced Core Web Vitals back in 2020 to offer customers a better website experience. Core web vitals is one of the most crucial ranking factors that measures how visually stable a website is, along with its loading speed and responsiveness. Missing the moment when your website’s core web vitals become worse can lower your visibility and ranking. Re-check them each time any significant changes are applied to your website so as not to miss out on any issue that may negatively affect user experience. To stay on top of the core web values metrics, you can use tools that define website speed (e.g. Page Speed Insights, Lighthouse, and Chrome UX Report).
https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhubspot.com%2F
Average CTR
The average click-through rate (CTR) shows the ad clicks VS impressions ratio. If you track your CTR rates and find them to be low, it most likely means that an advertisement has low relevance to your audience. Knowing this will save you time and funds, and help you correct your ad campaign and try again. Google Ads is the best place to check your average CTR. You can also look after the organic average CTR. This rate shows how many users click on the website link directly from the organic search engine results. While the ranking position is an essential factor influencing organic CTR, it also depends on the URL, title tag, and description the user sees in the SERP.
Average session duration
Measuring the average session duration gives you an understanding of how much time your visitors spend on the website.
It is calculated by dividing the total duration of all sessions by the number of sessions. Even though the usual session time is considered to last up to 3-4 minutes, there is not a single standard: it depends on the industry and the type of page. Yet, if visitors drop off the website almost right away, it’s worth investigating the content and usability of the website.
Conversion rate
Conversion rates are among the most important website metrics to track. Such rates show what percentage of visitors take the desired action on your website. It can be anything from completing a simple form or making a purchase — you can decide what the action should be based on the goals you have. You can measure the conversion rate by taking the conversion number and dividing it by the total number of interactions.
Measuring this rate helps you to see what advertising channels work the best and how well certain campaigns are performing. If you neglect to track conversion rates, you risk bumping into the same promotional mistakes over and over again. Measuring conversion rates can help you see which channels are the most effective for promotions and make smart strategic decisions.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate speaks for itself: it indicates the number of people who leave your website before taking any actions on it, bouncing off the website right away. It means that people land on the page but leave before investigating the website further, which can be concerning if the number is high.
Google Analytics will help you to track the bounce rate. To measure bounce rate, the system tracks cases in which a session ends before the user clicks on any other links on the page. Such single-page sessions are tracked and divided by the number of total visits.
Bounce rate is a decent indicator of how your page corresponds to the expectations of visitors. A high bounce rate can indicate low quality content, technical issues (like broken links or low website speed), or simply mean that the content does not align with the website intention.
https://www.practicalecommerce.com/google-analytics-dissecting-bounce-rates-ecommerce/
Indexed Pages
Indexed pages are the only way to get ranked by Google. When a page is indexed, it means that Google has sent crawlers to check and analyse your webpage, and has added it to Google's database called “index”. If your page is not indexed, it will not be shown in the SERP.
Checking which pages are indexed on your website will not take much time. Just enter the site:yourdomain.com in the Google search, and you will find the site’s web pages that Google indexed. Interactions Per Visit
During website development, most brands build customer journey maps — a path that shows how visitors travel through the website and interact with it. How do you know that anything is wrong?
By tracking interactions per visit, you can see how many interactions a visitor has with the website, and what and how deep these interactions are. You can easily look this number up in Google Analytics and track it from there.
When you understand how visitors are moving through the customer journey funnel, you can find ways to promptly improve it if anything goes wrong.
New Referring Domains
Referring (or linking) domains are one of the SEO ranking factors that can improve your website’s authority in the eyes of Google, given they are relevant and high-quality. When another website refers to your site, your page gets a backlink — that’s how the referring domain gets created.
To understand whether you have a decent number of referring domains, look at your competitors first — the number can vary from niche to niche. The more referring domains you have, the better. Yet, make sure you put quality first. First, you should understand your starting point and track all the backlinks connected to your website. Some backlink checker tools can help you with that, offering to show the number of referring domains.
Wrapping Up
Nowadays, it is extremely challenging to keep users' attention for a long time. Building a great user experience has become a priority for many businesses. In fact, it helps brands survive the competition. Even though strategic planning is important, hard data can give you the information you would not be able to find otherwise. There could be multiple reasons why your website is not getting enough traffic or why you aren't reaching your SEO goals.
Tracking important metrics for website performance can give you the answers. Applying this data correctly helps to save time, funds, and decrease the chances of running a failed campaign. In this article, we went over the top metrics to understand your website performance and find ways to improve it. Check out other articles to learn more about effective digital marketing tools that can twist your marketing game.