SEO is becoming increasingly complex and diverse, with a lot of different elements coming into play. The SEO performance of your website isn’t a straight line, but a jagged curve which constantly needs to be monitored in order to ensure it’s on the right trajectory.
Just like My Ranks enhances rank tracking reporting to your clients, there are a number of tools that let you track key SEO metrics and point you toward the tweaks you need to make in order to optimize your website performance.
Links
Links are like precious gems in the world of SEO. After all, Google itself named them as one of their top three ranking factors.
This is because they’re the ultimate testament to a content’s quality as they’re given for purely selfish reasons by a separate party to enhance its own readers’ experience.
When it comes to links, quality beats quantity all day, and quality is determined by the authority of the site linking to yours, and its relevance to your field.
Tools like SEMrush backlink Audit, Majestic, Moz’s Link Explorer, and Google Search Console help you track links. Conventional wisdom has it that it’s best to use a combination of at least a couple of them in order to get a fuller link profile since different tools index different links.
Being a free tool, Google Search Console naturally has less features, but it’s still very useful, especially if you are just dabbling in SEO metrics analysis. Search Console > Search Traffic > Links to your Site > Your most linked content > URL will give you an overview of the links to a URL.
As mentioned above though, it’s not the quantity so much as the quality of the links that truly counts, which is why spending some money on a pro tool that can gage quality would be a worthy investment.
Organic Search Traffic
Organic search traffic is one of the main indicators of your website SEO performance, and also one of the most straightforward to track and measure, which is why Google Analytics will more than do in this case.
One of the main aspects of organic search traffic you need to understand is that even though it’s organic, you should still weigh it against other traffic sources like social, referral, and even paid ones.
Once you access Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in Google Analytics, you’ll get an overview of the organic search traffic of different pages, as well as the ability to juxtapose it with the traffic from other channels.
However, organic search traffic mostly refers to the end number and not as much to how that number came to be and what it could have been, which brings us to the next point.
Organic Clicks, Impressions, CTR
Your click-through rate (CTR) is the number of organic clicks, divided by the number of impressions (times the page appears on SERP), and together, those three elements paint a telling picture of your SEO performance.
For example, if you get a high number of impressions but a low number of clicks, meaning your CTR will also be low, then you need to find ways to make people click more, like improving your meta descriptions, for example.
Conversely, if your CTR is high, but the number of your impressions is low, then the focus should be on ranking higher, perhaps through playing with different keywords and researching ones that draw more interest.
You can obtain data on this matter through Google Search Console. You just need to go to Status > Performance, then input a specific URL by first pressing “+NEW” and then choosing “Page.”
Page Speed
This is more on the technical side, but every bit as important, as Google has very low tolerance for slow-loading pages since they don’t make for the best user-experience. If your page loads slowly, Google will send it to the back of the queue.
The last thing you want is to let all those other, more comprehensive SEO efforts go to waste because of such a technicality.
Luckily, gaging page speed is quite straightforward, and Google actually provides its own tracker, the PageSpeed Insights Tool. Once you input your URL, you will get stats on both desktop and mobile speed and advice on ways to increase it.
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Crawl Errors
In layman’s terms, crawl errors are most famous for the 404(Not Found) message, which refers to a URL error. Other crawl errors encompass an entire site.
You should keep an eye out for crawl errors regularly as they hurt your website’s SEO performance. You just need to access Google Search Console and go to Crawl > Crawl Errors.
There’s a myriad of other indicators of your website’s SEO performance, but those are some of the fundamentals you constantly need to stay on top of and build on.
