10 SEO Metrics That Actually Matter

10 SEO metrics worth tracking

If you ask SEOs what data they look at the most, it’s likely organic traffic. Duh, that’s a no-brainer. However, it’s not an indicator of SEO success without more context in most cases.

In fact, you should never rely on a single number without knowing what’s behind it. So let’s tackle the intricacies of organic traffic first.

Organic traffic represents all non-paid clicks that come from search engines./p>

Why it’s useful

If your organic traffic is trending upwards, that could be a sign that your SEO efforts are paying off. However, keep in mind that more organic traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more sales unless you monetize your website traffic by displaying ads.

How to track it

The Performance tab in Google Search Console is going to give you the most accurate view of your organic traffic over time:

Keyword rankings refer to a website’s organic ranking positions in the search results for particular keywords.

Why it’s useful

You care about ranking well for some keywords more than others. Generally speaking, the more relevant the keyword is to your product and business, the more valuable it is for you to rank well for it.

Tracking your keyword rankings allows you to monitor your SEO performance for your most important keywords over time.

How to track it

For the most precise results, get a third-party rank tracking tool like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. Set up a project for your website, paste a bunch of keywords you want to track your rankings for, and you’re good to go.

You can get regular email alerts about the progress of your tracked keywords or just check the Rank Tracker reports once in a while:

Search visibility is the percentage of all clicks for your tracked keywords that land on your website. It’s essentially the SEO version of Share of Voice (SOV), one of the most important marketing KPIs that measures your brand’s visibility in the market.

Why it’s useful

There’s a strong relationship between SOV and market share. Generally speaking, the higher your SOV, the bigger your share of the pie. And the fact that it’s a relative metric makes it a more suitable KPI than organic traffic growth.

How to track it

Paste a representative sample of keywords that matter to you into Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. You should have these keywords ready if you’ve done your keyword research

Note that these should be the main keywords that encompass what your target audience is searching for (don’t bother with long-tails). This takes the keyword tracking from the previous point to another level.

Traffic value is how much you’d pay for all your organic clicks if they were to come from PPC search ads.

Why it’s useful

Generally speaking, the higher your traffic value, the more valuable your organic traffic becomes for your business.

While you should use SEO to drive traffic throughout the whole customer journey, clicks from visitors who are likely to make a conversion soon are the most valuable ones. That’s why you see many search ads for “money keywords” like “best SEO agency london” and none for “what is SEO.”

Increasing traffic value is also a great sign of overall SEO performance growth. Ranking well for “money keywords” and getting more traffic from them is generally much harder than ranking for keywords that people usually lookup with no intent to buy anything.

How to track it

But you can also dive deeper into the traffic value of pages. To do that, open the Top Pages report in Site Explorer and sort your pages by their traffic value to see your most valuable pages:

Conversions are important actions your visitors make on the website, like checking out, signing up, or subscribing to a service. Tracking these for all your traffic sources, including organic, is something most businesses already do.

Why it’s useful

Conversion tracking is usually easy to set up even if you have no coding knowledge. The more important thing here is making sure that you track the right conversions.

If you’re running an ecommerce store, the number of conversions, their value, and your average order value make the most sense for you. But, of course, you’ll have to set up Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in your Google Analytics to do that.

If you offer subscription-based software like us, it makes sense to track leads, trial signups, paid subscriptions, and eventually even each tier of new subscriptions.

However, regardless of the conversions that you’re tracking, it’s worth keeping a few things in mind:

• Google Analytics data is skewed one way or another.
• Google Analytics attributes conversions to the last traffic source by default. That doesn’t reflect how SEO or most other marketing channels contribute to those conversions.
• You should always compare periods that make sense to compare (this is especially important for businesses with seasonal sales swings)

Referring domains are websites that link to your website.

• Helps assess your site’s strength against competitors.
• Guides link-building strategies.

How to track it

• Moz Link Explorer

This tells you how many pages (more specifically URLs) a search engine has in its index.

Why it’s useful

Your pages first need to get indexed for them to appear in SERPs and drive organic traffic, but you’ll also want to keep some pages out of the index.

• Directly impacts user experience and SEO performance.
• Google’s Core Web Vitals include speed as a ranking factor.

Generally speaking, you want to see the number of indexed pages steadily increasing as you publish new content. Any sudden changes in the number are likely a sign of a technical SEO issue.

How to track it

But the best way to keep track of this number with more details is to check the Coverage report in your GSC account:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Optimize images, enable caching, use a CDN
• GTmetrix

Related to the previous metric, the number of pages that have index coverage errors is equally important. These errors are anything that prevents your pages from being indexed when it’s not done intentionally using the noindex robots meta tag.

• High conversions indicate effective search engine optimization.
• Helps measure ROI from SEO efforts.

Why it’s useful

Again, these errors also appear in the GSC Coverage report:

How to track it

If you want to dive deeper and get more guidance on how to fix your indexation issues, sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account and crawl your website using Site Audit:

• Clear CTAs (Call-to-Action)
• Optimize landing pages
• A/B test different elements

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of three technical SEO metrics related to your website speed and user experience. Here’s what the metrics are:

• Google Search Console → Mobile Usability Report
• Test with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

Why it’s useful

Google uses CWV as a minor ranking factor since June 2021. If any or all of these three metrics are very bad, it’s likely a good idea to try and fix them.This reflects Google’s effort to rank pages that offer a great user experience which entails good loading speed and smooth interactivity.

How to track it

Alternatively, you can again use Ahrefs’ Site Audit, check the Performance report and see the CWV metrics there besides other related metrics:

Ahrefs’ Site Audit has a metric called Health Score that reflects the proportion of internal URLs on your website that don’t have technical SEO errors:

Why it’s useful

The Health Score offers a reliable proxy for your overall state of technical SEO. The best thing is that you’ll see changes in your Health Score compared to previous crawls, including specific errors that contributed to that.

How to track it

Again, having a project in Site Audit is all you need here.Every time Ahrefsbot finishes crawling your website, it will update your Health Score and report accordingly. To see the changes in your website errors between crawls, head to the All issues report and select “Errors only”:

• Write in-depth, valuable content
• Use multimedia (videos, infographics)
• Improve readability (short paragraphs, bullet points)