How to Measure SEO Performance

hannasheadspace
Oct 21, 2024
3 min read

There are multiple ways to measure your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, including evaluating your search engine ranking page (SERP) visibility, bounce rate, organic traffic, and conversion rates.

Whether you’re managing your website’s SEO strategy with your own in-house team or are collaborating with an SEO agency, it’s important to understand the metrics that matter, how they work, and what goals you can reasonably set. After all, in a perfect world, a few blog posts that leverage powerful keywords quickly turn into sales conversions. However, the reality is that each of these metrics works on their own unique timeline that you need to understand.

Benefits of SEO

SEO is the technical and creative strategies used to boost your site’s credibility via the SERP. With a robust SEO strategy, you can target specific markets and languages, as well as generate cost-effective leads and build trust with the audience you build.

Unlike Google Ads, which expire and leave you right back where you started, SEO focuses on building credibility through technical SEO strategies and high-quality, engaging content that resonates with your target audience.

The right SEO strategy will help you reach your marketing and sales goals, including increased conversions bringing organic traffic to your website.

Key Metrics for Measuring SEO Performance

SEO relies on editing and optimizing your website content so that Google’s web crawler pushes it higher on the SERP. While the SERP is a great way to evaluate how effective your SEO strategy is, there are multiple ways to measure success.

SERP Visibility

SERP visibility refers to where your content or website ranks on the search results page. This is what your target audience sees when they search for content that is relevant to your brand.

A lower number assigned to your ranking indicates a higher ranking. For example, if you are ranked one on Google’s SERP, that means you are the top result for that search. There are numerous tools that track the position of keywords so you can monitor your SEO performance. However, many of these tools require you to track keyword comparisons and rankings manually, which can be a tedious process.

Bounce Rate

What is a ‘bounce?’ A bounced session means a visitor clicked onto the page but left without browsing your website beyond the page they initially clicked on. Higher bounce rates can occur if the content the visitor clicked on doesn’t relate to the content of your website or if your user interface and user experience needs some help.

Organic Traffic

Organic web traffic refers to visits that come to your website that aren’t through ad-clicks. This metric determines how much quality traffic you get, and this traffic is measured by users, clicks, and sessions. You can also measure the click-through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of people that clicked on your page from a search results page. This information can tell you about:

The optimization of your page titles
The optimization of your meta descriptions
How relevant your featured snippets are
How relevant your overall content is

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a particular action on your website out of the total number of users who clicked onto your site. Some common examples include signing up for an email list or making a purchase.

This metric gauges how effectively your pages can turn or convert visitors into leads and customers.

How Do You Measure Up?

The four metrics we listed above are just the tip of the iceberg. Effective SEO is a multifaceted approach to boosting your website’s visibility and meeting your goals for your digital presence. Page speed, engagement time, and backlinks are just a few other metrics you need to consider.

Not sure how to get started? High Voltage offers a wide range of high-quality SEO audits. Our team of experts deep-dives into your website to uncover what is working and what isn’t. Then, we craft a plan that caters to your business’s unique goals with technical recommendations and content strategies. Want full-service assistance? We offer that, too.