You Ask, I Answer: Top SEO Metrics and Analytics?

In today's episode, Joanne asks, what are the top data analytics you should be looking at to help with SEO performance? So what do we measure? How do we measure SEO intelligently? What are the things that we should be looking at? There's five sets of numbers that I think tell a story, tell a good story about SEO in a way that we can use to diagnose not only what's happening with our SEO program, but maybe what's going wrong.

And some of them can even provide advanced warning that things are not going our way. No surprise, it follows the basic customer journey. So your first measure of SEO, organic impressions. This is something you measure in like Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console. How often are you showing up in searches?

Right? If on a on a per term basis, how often is your sh your website being shown by Google to users? Say, hey, Google thinks that for the whatever term that the user typed in, you're a good fit for this term. So we're going to show your website somewhere, you know, on the top 500 results. Um, and obviously, you know, things like ranking positions and stuff do matter to some degree, but just that number alone, how much are you showing up in search?

That's number one. That's sort of your very top of your SEO funnel. Because if you're not showing up at all in search, guess what? You're not going to get any business out of search. That's that's number one.

Number two, are the number of organic search clicks. And again, this comes from tools like Bing Webmaster Tools and uh Google Search Console. When your site shows up in a search result, it's kind of like a pay-per-click ad almost, right? Just you're not paying for it. How many times a person clicks on your listing in a search listing is an effective measure of saying how many times does the human agree with Google that this result is relevant?

If you type in Chris Penn, but you're really looking for the the uh late Chris Penn, the actor, and you see my site in the listing, you're not going to click on it because you'll it'll say marketing keynote speaker, Christopher Penn, and you're like, uh, that's not who I was looking for. I was looking for the guy in reservoir dogs. So for that search, um, that result would not be relevant and you wouldn't get the click. If on the other hand you search for um marketing expert Chris Penn and you see my website, you're gonna click on it because that aligns with what you were looking for. So your second measure in SEO is organic clicks.

How many times does the human agree with the search engine that your site is the right choice, the answer to their question? And again, that's one of those things where if the number is zero, you're in trouble. Number three, and this should be pretty obvious. Organic search traffic on your website. How much or traffic are you getting from organic search on your website?

Simple, simple measure. Again, if the answer is zero, SEO is not doing anything for you. So you want to keep an eye on that number. How much actual traffic are you getting? This is more complex than it looks sometimes because there are plenty of searches for which Google in particular will show an exam an answer in like you know their answer box uh results that doesn't require a click, right?

If someone types in trust insights hours of operation, right, it'll spit the answer out on the on the website and on right in Google, and no, you don't have to click. There's no reason to click because the answer is right there. But you still want to keep an eye on your organic traffic, it should still generally not be going down and to the right. Number four, and this one is probably the one that I think I see least used, organic session duration. How long does an or a user from organic search spend with you?

How much time they spend with you during that visit? This is important because again, if somebody clicks through, maybe they see that that snippet, that preview, and they click on the listing. If they spend two seconds, like they read the first half, you know, two sentences on the page, like, uh nope, this wasn't it. And they're boom, they're out. They didn't they didn't see value in what you had to offer.

If they come in and they spend like 22 minutes on your site in that session from organic search, not only did they find what they were looking for, but they found a bunch of other stuff they were looking for too, and that's a good thing. That's a great thing. You want that. You want people to come into your site and go, wow, it's like a buffet. I could there's so much here that I want.

So organic session duration is uh I think an important number. And the fifth and final one, conversions, right? How many conversions have organic search somewhere in the conversion journey? Maybe it wasn't the last thing somebody did, but it was in there, it helped. It was part of the journey.

If the answer to this number is zero, then organic search isn't doing anything for you. Right? So whatever attribution model you're using, make sure that organic search is in there, that SEO is that's how you know SEO is working because it's helping convert. Because it means that you found the right person, brought them to the right place at the right time that they wanted to do the thing. So those are the five measures that I like, and the reason I like them is because they tell a story from Does Google or the search engine think you're you're relevant?

Does the user agree? When the does the user click through, does the user spend time with you after clicking through? Does the user do something of value to you? That tells that nice story that's very linear from a uh data perspective. And if you see one of those areas go off the rails, the number just goes to zero, you know what to fix.

That's the important part, right? If organic impressions go to zero, it means Google doesn't think you're relevant anymore. And so you need to spend some time optimizing uh on site and off site. If you're not getting clicks, but you're getting impressions, that means that um things like your uh your page's appearance in the organic search, it's not answering people's questions, right? They look at the list and go, that doesn't seem relevant to me, and they don't click on it.

You can tune that to some degree. Organic traffic. If if people are clicking or uh are seeing you on the results, um that organic traffic number is one that tells you, yeah, we're we're getting traffic from this search engine and this search engine. There are some customers, some clients I've seen, they get more of their traffic from like Bing or Yahoo than Google, and as long as that traffic's converting, that's good to know. Number four, if people are not spending time with you, your content sucks.

There's no there's no way to sugarcoat that, right? If they if people don't spend time with you, it's because they don't value you, they don't see what's in it for them in your content. And finally, uh, if there's no conversions, then you're not offering the right things. Assuming you did a good job with the first four stages, your offer is broken, right? Your offer is not appealing.

What whatever the offer is, download an ebooks, subscribe to the newsletter, buy a shirt, whatever, it's not aligned with what people are there for. So those would be the measures that I recommend for SEO. If you're going to be measuring SEO, I like those measures. I like them because they tell you what's wrong, they tell you how to fix it, and they're easy. They're easy to look at.

Go, okay, this is up, this is down, this is up, this is down, and you can get started fixing things really quickly. There are tons of other measures and metrics that you can look at and search. And there's two ways to address those. I like this for people just to get them started. You know, impressions, clicks, traffic, session duration, and conversions.

If you want to get fancy, you take your conversions and you take all the SEO metrics you have, and you do a very sophisticated statistical test of regression analysis to see which SEO metrics have the highest correlation to the outcome conversions that you care about. Maybe some of these measures don't matter for your site, maybe other ones do. I would encourage you to do that if you're if you find that you're not able to get the needle to move after looking at these these numbers. That's but that's a more advanced technique. It's uh it's a tougher technique to use for a lot of companies.

Start with these. Really good question. Thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.