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Promoting a business online is a lot more than creating great content. There might be times where you will have a constant feeling of uncertainty about your content, its quality, reach, visibility and all other factors required to boost your website’s traffic. Therefore, it is essential to create a strong SEO strategy which includes analysis and tracking of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) commonly known as the SEO metrics.

SEO specialists must continuously update their skills and use the latest SEO metrics to stay ahead of the continuously changing behaviour of online users. This also helps you to adhere to the fluctuating digital marketing trends while keeping a track of their online activities.

Additionally, monitoring SEO metrics allows businesses to avoid spending excess time and money on things which are not efficient in driving the business. As experts recommend monitoring several SEO metrics to analyse the performance of online content, here is a list of top 10 SEO metrics that you should monitor to promote your business online.

Keyword Performance
Keywords are essential to increase the search engine ranking of any webpage and bring the website to the first page of search engines such as Bing and Google. Keyword tracking helps businesses know which keywords are good for driving more traffic to the website and which keywords need to be removed or modified to increase their efficiency.
It also gives a good evaluation of a website’s performance in terms of search engine results when compared to the results of the competitor’s websites. Some of the best SEO tools to track keyword performance are SEO Profiler, Raven SEO and Wordstream.

Search Rankings
Once you have tracked the performance of your keywords, the next step is to check the web page ranking in search engines for the chosen keywords. As higher search positions help you boost factors such as traffic, conversion and leads, it directly correlates with the success of your SEO campaign. You can monitor the progress of your websites search positions for different target keywords using tools such as Ahrefs and Serpstat.

Organic Traffic
Evaluating the organic traffic is one of the simplest ways to find out the returns of an SEO campaign. Organic traffic is the day-to-day traffic generated from the search engines.
It is free to receive which means users arrive at the landing page without any support from paid ads. The best way to analyse organic traffic is by using Google Analytics where you can get a weekly or monthly overview of your organic traffic.

Time Spent on Site
To understand how effective your content has been for your SEO, you will have to analyse the time spent by organic traffic visitors on your website. Usually, the longer the amount of time spent on your website indicates how relevant your content is to visitors.
As users will find your content using different keywords, it is important to maintain a natural flow of relevant keywords in your content. Websites, where users spend more time on a page and engage with it, are referred to as high-quality sites by search engines.

Returning Visitors
To measure how engaging your content is, you can check the number of returning visitors on your website. For visitors to return, you need to continuously update your website with some interesting and unique content. If the count of your returning visitors is low, you will have to create more engaging content and invite visitors by sending them emails to keep coming back to check out the new posts.

Bounce Rate
The bounce rate indicates the number of people who bounce away from a website after viewing only a single page. As it is measured as the percentage of visitors, the lower the number the better your website’s performance. Having a high bounce rate means the visitors are not getting the information which they are looking for from your website.
Therefore, you need to focus more on the web site’s content to provide relevant content to keep the visitors engaged on the website for a longer time. To reduce the bounce rate, you can show links of related posts the content or other interesting items on the right-hand sidebar of the webpage.

Load Speed of a Page
If your webpage takes more than usual time to load, it is likely that the visitors will leave your website. This might lead to an increase in your bounce rate and reduce the organic traffic on your website. This is due to search engines not ranking your website higher due to slow loading speeds. So, make sure to optimise the load speed of your page and constantly analyse it to enhance the quality of your business website and increase the number of visitors.

Quality of Backlinks
Another crucial SEO metric for SEO experts and content marketers is backlinks. Creating reliable backlinks helps websites gain higher rankings in the search engines results page and increases referral visits.
To evaluate the quality of backlinks you must check the number of links per page, the number of domains linked to a website, type of backlinks created and the distribution of links. You can also use backlinks analysis tools such as Majestic, Ahrefs and Serpstat’s Backlink Analysis tool to track the quality score of your backlinks.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR generally indicates the number of people who visited your website after viewing one of your pages in the search results. CTR is one of the crucial indicators to specify the efficiency of your page in attracting the users through search engine results. It also defines the quality of a website’s meta descriptions and title tags and suggests how appealing your content is to increase your website’s traffic. To monitor your CTR, you can use the Google Search Console.

Crawl Errors
Crawl errors usually occur when a search engine bot tries to crawl a URL but fails to do so. To enhance the performance of your website, it is essential to monitor these errors and resolve them. The best tools for finding crawl errors are Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools which openly reports on crawl errors.

Check your Website’s SEO Metrics Now!
These 10 SEO metrics are essential for you to regularly check on your business’s website. Thankfully, there are many tools online that can help monitor SEO metrics so that they are not too time-consuming or challenging. The importance of measuring these metrics is clear, your website’s performance can impact your rankings, visitors and therefore, sales. So, get started monitoring your online business now.

Author Bio
Laura Butler is co-owner at Outreach Lab, who specialise in providing content writing and SEO services to businesses around the world. Having worked in multiple start-ups over the years, she has experience in building businesses from the ground up. Laura enjoys writing content on a variety of topics, from business strategy to marketing, SEO and sustainability.