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Search engine optimization is an important process for websites, blogs etc. Basically anything that's on the internet and that needs traffic has SEO as its tenet. The better your content and the harder you work on bringing in traffic, the more successful you'll get in pushing your website up the SEO ladder.
That's not all. Creating original and quality content is only half the story of successful SEO campaigns.
You'll have to devise an SEO strategy and knowing where your website or blog ranks in helping you know what you'll have to do next. And there are lots of numbers and statistics involved which at times may be confusing, but still remain important.
Although there are many numbers, stats, metrics and although all of them combined can yield very good insight into what needs to be done so your website's ranking can improve on search engines, you have to know now that there is no single number that tells you everything you need to know.
You have to gather information from all angles and decide the next step accordingly, otherwise, only considering a single metric and taking action might have unintended and adverse results. Tread carefully, know your stats and act carefully, otherwise the measure you thought would bring you more traffic could end up pushing important impressions, clicks, and sales away.
It's also important to note on the other hand that there are just too many metrics provided by Google Analytics and other SEO tools. Google, for example, has around 200 metrics.
It's almost impossible, even irrelevant to consider all the stats. So we'll only talk about the more important ones.
Impressions and clicks are one of the most basic stats. In many SEO tools as well as in Google Analytics you can find it in the dashboard.
Needless to say that impressions are how many times a link has been seen but not clicked. Clicks on the other hand, are self-explanatory.
How many people have clicked your link. It follows from this that if your website has had a click it also had an impression.
Click through rate is a percentage, how many of the impressions have garnered clicks and is an important metric to measure ranking. Of course impressions are nearly useless when it comes to revenue and sales.
They are even called a vanity metric by some as they have no intrinsic value except for indicating that your website is appearing in the search engine's result pages. Click through rates or CTRs however are an even better indicator of how well your site is doing.
Probably one of the best metrics that you can get and it doesn't come easy as it's not right there on your dashboard.
You need to go on and do a branded and non-branded search, in other words search for your brand and further check out where you rank within your niche with the non-branded search.
Also know that keyword ranking is a very good marker that you can check on for progress, how far you've come, and where you'll be heading. But it's also equally important to note that when there are sudden changes, it may not always be a cause to sweat and rush changing your whole SEO strategy entirely.
To check for keyword ranking, you're going to have to use trackers like Ahref and Semrush. Learn how to check your SEO ranking using the link.
Backlinks occur when your website's link is referred to from another website which had embedded your link. It obviously boosts traffic and is a great way to generate traction but it also tells a great story to the search engines on what you've been doing right.
For Google, backlinks are very important however, as your website gets linked to a lot by the same page, those backlinks naturally start losing their power, but hey, they're still bringing in traffic.
If your referring domains metric is on the low you're going to need to dial up on your link building efforts.
Domain Authority is a metric that isn't included in Google and was created by SEO tools. Domain Authority basically takes into account various stats and comes up with a grade out of a 100. The higher your site gets out of 100, the better.
It's also great to consider organic traffic. This is a very good marker as it tells you if all your SEO planning is working or not. Of course, this stat is available in Google Analytics.
Measuring every single metric is near impossible, and if possible, it's probably not useful. Taking into account hundreds of data points which may clash against each other won't help you frame an amazing SEO strategy, but keeping your eyes fixed on all the right ones definitely will.
