What Is Search Engine Monitoring & Which Metrics Should You Be Tracking

When you put time and effort into implementing a search engine optimization strategy, you need to make sure that your campaign is working effectively. 

SEO campaigns generate a massive amount of data. With a targeted plan, you can use this data to see how your SEO strategy affects everything from rankings to conversions.

But first, make sure you're tracking the right SEO metrics for the goals you have set. Analyzing SEO metrics can help you better understand why your website is performing the way it is and allows you to address any problems or errors you discover. In addition, the effectiveness of your website has a direct impact on your business.

This guide will show you how to monitor SEO, what website metrics you should be tracking and how. 

SEO monitoring involves analyzing measurable SEO metrics in order to evaluate the success of your SEO efforts. 

This includes reporting on the effectiveness of your strategies and making necessary changes to the implementation process based on data insights. Marketers can determine the value of SEO's contribution to marketing by analyzing data. It allows marketers to measure success as well as identify what worked and what didn't.

Additionally, SEO metrics help businesses in improving marketing campaigns in order to direct them toward the achievement of marketing objectives.

Monitoring SEO performance on a regular basis allows you to stay on track with your goals, identify new SEO opportunities, stay up to date on search algorithm changes, monitor ROI, and determine whether you should invest more time and resources to your current strategy or modify it.

Keep reading to learn which metrics you should monitor when running an SEO campaign. 

Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your site as a result of organic clicks. It refers to the part of your site traffic that comes from the SERPs without you having to pay for it like you would with PPC or display ads.  

The primary goal of SEO is usually to increase organic traffic. Organic search generates 53.3% of total website traffic. 

You want to track organic traffic to all of your pages in order to evaluate their performance. Look into why pages gain or lose popularity and which need to be optimized. In addition, comparing your traffic to the industry and to your competitors lets you see how you measure up.

You can monitor your traffic of the entire site in Google Analytics or Google Search Console. 

Select your web property in Google Analytics, then click Acquisition > Overview > Organic Search to see your site's organic traffic. 

To see movement in organic traffic, look at the 30-day, 90-day, and 12-month views. 

Custom alerts in Google Analytics allow you to set up notifications on particular percentages of lower traffic. The alerts are automatically comparative, allowing you to detect changes in long-term performance periods.

To understand dramatic differences in site visits, you need to do additional monitoring into the state of your rankings, audience, and market, just as you would with any other type of SEO analysis. You need to find the source of these unexpected changes.

You can also divide your organic traffic monitoring further by subcategories such as landing pages. You can clearly see the positive growth on these pages if you have increases in traffic from specific landing pages. But, low traffic on other landing pages is an opportunity to rethink your content for better results.

The click-through rate (CTR) is an engagement metric that compares the number of people who visit your site from search results to the total number of times your site appears in search results (impressions). 

While you may believe that the CTR only relates with your ranking, it can also translate your ability to meet search intent into data. If your title appears to answer the main question, users are more likely to skip higher-ranked sites, increasing your CTR.

Measuring your click-through rate is an important part of your daily SEO monitoring. In Google Search Console, you can find the average CTR for a specific page or keyword. You can also find information on zero-click searches, search intent, and SERP results.  

To view a page’s click-through rate in Google Search Console, select your Web property > click Search Results in the left navigation bar > toggle the Average CTR button.

CTR can help you determine whether your SEO page title and meta description are persuasive enough to attract users to visit your page. It can also help you identify if your page is relevant to the search intent of the keyword. 

The bounce rate — the number of people who leave your site after only viewing one page. It   is an important metric because it indicates how engaging your site is for visitors.

Since it’s the amount of exiting visitors after a one-page session, a low bounce rate is best for SEO, especially when you want to direct users toward a conversion that needs continued navigation.

But it's possible that your pages aren't meeting users' needs or are hard to use, resulting in your bounce rate to skyrocket.

Keeping an eye out for a high bounce rate is usually a good idea, so you can act quickly to optimize your page and keep potential customers' attention.

For example, your page load speed could be slowed down, causing impatient visitors to run back to the SERPs. When you receive a high bounce rate alert, you may run an SEO audit to narrow in on the issue areas.

Google Analytics provides customized alerts to track the bounce rate. Depending on the nature of the keyword and page, identifying the pages where visitors quickly depart can be an indication that you should spend more time on search intent.

You can view your bounce rate in Google Analytics by going to Behavior > Overview.

The percentage of organic visitors who took the action you want them to take in your site is known as the organic conversion rate.

It is essentially a website action that differs based on the business. The most common examples are signing up, purchasing something, or filling out a form. 

Monitoring the SEO process via your conversion rate is related to your ability to convert site visitors into customers. 

To measure conversion rate, you'll need to set up event tracking and goals in Google Analytics so that the tool can effectively measure and track conversions. Depending on the nature of your business, you should check it weekly or monthly.

In Google Analytics, you can set a goal or create an alert for user engagement steps. The conversions section in Google Analytics is one of the five major reports, and it includes a detailed breakdown of options as well as data visualization.

You can track the various steps down the sales funnel for measuring user interest in your site. E-commerce stores, in particular, need conversion rate tracking to make sure they have a consistent income from SEO optimization.

Web pages need to be indexed in order to appear in search engine results pages. You can request Google to index your site using the URL Inspection tool.

Your SEO strategy will most likely lead you to make edits, changes, and additions to your pages after Google has indexed your site.

To guarantee that your site appears in the most favorable way, it's beneficial to have Google recognize any significant changes and rank your pages appropriately. Recrawling allows Google to find the updates and rank them properly in the SERPs.

There are SEO monitoring tools available to record search engine bot crawling behavior. You can find out how many pages Google has indexed using Google Search Console. You can see how many pages Google crawled on a regular basis over the last 90 days, letting you know if your SEO strategy is still in effect.

Google has a crawl rate limit, which influences the rate and type of page crawling. If crawling slows down your server, you can limit how many times Google can crawl your site if the Googlebot requests it too many times per second.

As long as you keep an eye on Google's crawling habits, you can be confident that your changes will be available in SERPs and for user satisfaction.

When you optimize a page for a specific keyword, your goal is to rank as high up on the SERP as possible. 

The keyword ranking indicates where the website ranks in a search for a specific keyword. One of the main indicators of a successful SEO content marketing campaign is the ranking of target keywords. Keyword ranking is one the most straightforward SEO metrics. It's a near-direct indicator of how well you've optimized a page for a keyword. 

Nearly, because other ranking factors besides keywords such as domain authority, E-A-T factors, and other non keyword related factors have an impact on how well your content performs.

In Google Search Console, you can see which keywords and pages your site ranks for. Google Search Console allows you to examine the queries that bring in users. 

The queries over time indicate whether your keywords appear on the first page of the SERPs. Your lowest ranking keywords may indicate that you should either move on to better keywords or work on improving those pages.

The search query data, however, is incomplete, and the dashboard is limited. Given the important role of this metric, you may need to use a rank tracking tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush.

Pages that lack interesting information and useful data are likely to be the places where visitors leave your site. In other cases, your visitors may be simply clicking on links embedded in your content.

Depending on where, when, and why your page visitors exit, you can devise a strategy to maximize their sessions and capitalize on their presence at these drop-off points.

If you want to direct visitors to a deeper area of your site or a conversion, look at which pages have a high percentage of exits. Exit points from specific pages can be found in Google Analytics' Site Content section under Behavior. 

Knowing what is causing people to leave your site is important for your strategy. You'll realize what actions you need to take to reverse this effect.

You can also view the links that lead people away from your site in the Events and Event Labels sections.

Referring visitors to other sites can be an adequate move, but you need to decide whether it is beneficial for your business or not. Examine what draws them to other sites and see if you can provide that service or resource on your own.

Search engine optimization campaigns generate a great deal of data that can be analyzed to figure out how effective the campaign is.

SEO monitoring involves evaluating measurable SEO metrics and modifying the implementation process based on insights from data. Organic traffic, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, keyword rankings, crawling, and site exit points are the seven metrics you should track when running an SEO campaign. 

This way you can direct marketing campaigns toward achieving objectives, monitor ROI, and determine if you should invest more resources in the current strategy or change it by analyzing these metrics.