Measuring & Tracking SEO Success Flashcards
Main performance metrics to consider
Time on page - How long did people spend on your page? If you have a 2,000-word blog post that visitors are only spending an average of 10 seconds on, the chances are slim that this content is being consumed (unless they’re a mega-speed reader). However, if a URL has a low time on page, that’s not necessarily bad either. Consider the intent of the page. For example, it’s normal for “Contact Us” pages to have a low average time on page.
Pages per Visit - Was the goal of your page to keep readers engaged and take them to a next step? If so, then pages per visit can be a valuable engagement metric. If the goal of your page is independent of other pages on your site (ex: visitor came, got what they needed, then left), then low pages per visit are okay.
Bounce Rate - “Bounced” sessions indicate that a searcher visited the page and left without browsing your site any further. Many people try to lower this metric because they believe it’s tied to website quality, but it actually tells us very little about a user’s experience. We’ve seen cases of bounce rate spiking for redesigned restaurant websites that are doing better than ever. Further investigation discovered that people were simply coming to find business hours, menus, or an address, then bouncing with the intention of visiting the restaurant in person. A better metric to gauge page/site quality is scroll depth.
Scroll Depth - This measures how far visitors scroll down individual webpages. Are visitors reaching your important content? If not, test different ways of providing the most important content higher up on your page, such as multimedia, contact forms, and so on. Also consider the quality of your content. Are you omitting needless words? Is it enticing for the visitor to continue down the page? Scroll depth tracking can be set up in your Google Analytics.
How can you set the scroll depth metric
You can do this in Google Analytics
Different Data you can see in GA
Isolate Organic Traffic - GA allows you to view traffic to your site by channel. This will mitigate any scares caused by changes to another channel (ex: total traffic dropped because a paid campaign was halted, but organic traffic remained steady).
Traffic To Your Site Over time - GA allows you to view total sessions/users/pageviews to your site over a specified date range, as well as compare two separate ranges.
How many Visits a Particular Page Has Received - Site Content reports in GA are great for evaluating the performance of a particular page — for example, how many unique visitors it received within a given date range.
Traffic from a specified campaign - You can use UTM (urchin tracking module) codes for better attribution. Designate the source, medium, and campaign, then append the codes to the end of your URLs. When people start clicking on your UTM-code links, that data will start to populate in GA’s “campaigns” report.
CTR - Your CTR from search results to a particular page (meaning the percent of people that clicked your page from search results) can provide insights on how well you’ve optimized your page title and meta description. You can find this data in Google Search Console, a free Google tool.
In addition, Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy tracking pixels to your website without having to modify the code. This makes it much easier to track specific triggers or activity on a website.
Additional Common SEO Metrics
Domain Authority & Page Authority - Moz’s proprietary authority metrics provide powerful insights at a glance and are best used as benchmarks relative to your competitors’ Domain Authority and Page Authority.
Keyword Rankings - A website’s ranking position for desired keywords. This should also include SERP feature data, like featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes that you’re ranking for. Try to avoid vanity metrics, such as rankings for competitive keywords that are desirable but often too vague and don’t convert as well as longer-tail keywords.
Number of Backlinks - Total number of links pointing to your website or the number of unique linking root domains (meaning one per unique website, as websites often link out to other websites multiple times). While these are both common link metrics, we encourage you to look more closely at the quality of backlinks and linking root domains your site has.
How To Track These Metrics - There are lots of different tools available for keeping track of your site’s position in SERPs, site crawl health, SERP features, and link metrics, such as Moz Pro and STAT.
The Moz and STAT APIs (among other tools) can also be pulled into Google Sheets or other customizable dashboard platforms for clients and quick at-a-glance SEO check-ins. This also allows you to provide more refined views of only the metrics you care about.
Dashboard tools like Data Studio, Tableau, and PowerBI can also help to create interactive data visualizations.
Evaluating a Site’s Health With an SEO Website Audit
By having an understanding of certain aspects of your website — its current position in search, how searchers are interacting with it, how it’s performing, the quality of its content, its overall structure, and so on — you’ll be able to better uncover SEO opportunities. Leveraging the search engines’ own tools can help surface those opportunities, as well as potential issues:
Google Search Console - If you haven’t already, sign up for a free Google Search Console (GSC) account and verify your website(s). GSC is full of actionable reports you can use to detect website errors, opportunities, and user engagement.
Bing Webmaster Tools - Bing Webmaster Tools has similar functionality to GSC. Among other things, it shows you how your site is performing in Bing and opportunities for improvement.
Lighthouse Audit - Google’s automated tool for measuring a website’s performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more. This data improves your understanding of how a website is performing. Gain specific speed and accessibility insights for a website here.
PageSpeed Insights - Provides website performance insights using Lighthouse and Chrome User Experience Report data from real user measurement (RUM) when available.
Structured Data Testing Tool - Validates that a website is using schema markup (structured data) properly.
Mobile-Friendly Test - Evaluates how easily a user can navigate your website on a mobile device.
Web.dev - Surfaces website improvement insights using Lighthouse and provides the ability to track progress over time.
Tools for web devs and SEOs - Google often provides new tools for web developers and SEOs alike, so keep an eye on any new releases here.
Technical SEO Audit Course Here: https://academy.moz.com/technical-seo-site-audit
Crawlability
Are your primary web pages crawlable by search engines, or are you accidentally blocking Googlebot or Bingbot via your robots.txt file? Does the website have an accurate sitemap.xml file in place to help direct crawlers to your primary pages?
Indexed Pages
Can your primary pages be found using Google? Doing a site:yoursite.com OR site:yoursite.com/specific-page check in Google can help answer this question. If you notice some are missing, check to make sure a meta robots=noindex tag isn’t excluding pages that should be indexed and found in search results.
Pages Titles & Meta Descriptions
Do your titles and meta descriptions do a good job of summarizing the content of each page? How are their CTRs in search results, according to Google Search Console? Are they written in a way that entices searchers to click your result over the other ranking URLs? Which pages could be improved? Site-wide crawls are essential for discovering on-page and technical SEO opportunities.
Page Speed
How does your website perform on mobile devices and in Lighthouse? Which images could be compressed to improve load time?
Content Quality
How well does the current content of the website meet the target market’s needs? Is the content 10X better than other ranking websites’ content? If not, what could you do better? Think about things like richer content, multimedia, PDFs, guides, audio content, and more.
Performing a content audit
Removing old, thin, barely visited content pages can be a good idea.
Learn more about content pruning here: https://moz.com/blog/clean-site-cruft-before-it-causes-ranking-problems-whiteboard-friday
Some questions for your competitor performance audit
- Which keywords are competitors ranking on page 1 for, but your website isn’t?
- Which keywords is your website ranking on page 1 for that also have a featured snippet? You might be able to provide better content and take over that snippet.
- Which websites link to more than one of your competitors, but not to your website?
Prioritising your SEO Fixes
Use the important, urgent matrix to prioritise which SEO tasks to go about doing first. Task examples I’m not familiar with:
- Video sitemaps
- Meta Keywords Tags
Moz free SEO task planning template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cWb1KgGDEqgx0thBRz_2k3usOzLYjGcbajKhyL4fNvE/copy
It’s important to plan and record actions taken on a site because you can then measure each action taken against performance in the follow up
Communicate with your client
Many changes can be made to a site including small ones that aren’t noticeable to the client. This is why it’s important to keep the flow of communication so that they know what is being done on a site.
