The Most Important SEO Benchmarks To Keep an Eye on
Last updated: 2022-03-17
Obviously, there is a multitude of SEO metrics you can and should watch for your visitors in your dashboards, but that doesn't imply you must track everything. Keep reading to learn the most important benchmarks to keep an eye on.
SEO might be the most complex and challenging marketing method for calculating ROI. When Google pushes an update, you are sometimes unsure which activities to prioritise and which to abandon.
However, when it comes to SEO, you must benchmark your SEO strategy to know where to improve and which strategies to leave out. But how can you be positive that your SEO plan yields favorable results?
What is a Benchmark, and Why Create SEO Benchmarks?
A benchmark is a reference or standard point against which things can be compared or evaluated. When you establish an SEO benchmark for your company, you can compare future outcomes to that statistic. As a result, you can determine whether your SEO approach is growing organic search traffic and generating more income for your company.
You may monitor several data points for Search Engine Optimisation performance when it comes to SEO analytics and SEO benchmarks. To analyse the influence of your keyword research, content production, on-page SEO, and website navigation initiatives, you should concentrate on the conversion value, total conversions, and total traffic from search engines.
Greater free traffic from search engines like Google and Bing should reward your efforts. Plus, as you improve the content of your website and optimise it, you should be able to set foot on the top of Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The performance of your SEO effort will be measured using the benchmarks and data points given below.
Benchmark Your SEO Performance with these SEO Benchmark Metrics
1. Landing Pages
The landing pages are the pages that direct users to your website. Landing pages are frequently used to increase website visitors. When it comes to SEO, the more information you have, the better. Landing pages will allow you to see how much traffic is growing depending on the unique themes of each landing page, as well as how much traffic and purchases each landing page generates.
2. Featured Snippets
The results page of every search engine is constantly changing. It's different from the old days when our desktop displays had tubes in them. The difference is in terms of interaction and user experience. The boxes of information that show above the organic search results are known as featured snippets. Here is a good example of a featured snippet:
You may utilise software to track your featured snippet performance, or if you prefer, you can use Chrome's incognito mode to look for your optimised sites and check whether they're showing featured snippets when you search for them.
Ideally, the closer your phrase is to the search keywords, the more likely you are to get a highlighted snippet. You should make it a priority to have a relevant, high-level paragraph on each blog that covers the key phrase you've optimised it for.
3. Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is a Moz-developed search engine ranking rating. It's a number that indicates how well a website will do in search engine results pages (SERPs). Ideally, the higher your DA, the more likely your page will rank high in search results. You can use Moz or Ahrefs to track your domain authority and then use a historical widget to see how it has changed over time. You can also compare your DA to that of your nearest competitors to observe how theirs is progressing.
4. Link Toxicity / Backlink Profile
"Link authority," or the amount of credible websites connecting to your website, is one of the essential things to benchmark your SEO. This statistic has remained a powerful indicator for SEO performance despite modifications to Google's search algorithm.
Fortunately, there are a lot of services and SEO tools that can help you with this SEMrush Backlink Audit tool is an excellent tool for determining how much clout your material has and if it is rising or declining over time.
Link-building, or the effective acquisition of high-quality links, may propel your website to the top of competitive keyword searches, resulting in a rapid increase in traffic.
5. Content Decay
It's quicker to update old blogs than it is to write new articles on the subject. Starting with your most popular content and working your way down the list is a good idea.
To give it a significant refresh, make sure you change between 10% and 20% of the content. Keep the original publishing date, but add a remark saying it was updated on such-and-such a date to show crawlers that you're concerned about your content. Make sure to provide a link to a more current post if you have one.
6. Bounce Rate
When it comes to SEO, it's not only about keywords and DA; it's also about user intent. You can see the bounce rate of your page to benchmark your SEO efforts. The bounce rate indicates whether or not it meets the user’s goal.
If a visitor is looking for information on a specific topic and possibly end up on a product page, they will soon return to the search results. Bounce rate might also signal other issues, such as a slow-loading website. If the website you clicked on takes too long to load, you'll probably return to your search and try something else.
7. Organic and Referral Traffic
After you've set Google Analytics on your website, you'll be able to see how many visitors you have and where they're coming from. Organic traffic should develop steadily over time. However, referral traffic will generally result in occasional intervals, especially if the referral is in a time-sensitive article.
You should look at month-to-month statistics as well as monthly year-over-year data when it comes to organic traffic. It's also a terrific idea to look at week-to-week data for larger organisations with a lot of visitors.
8. Number of Keywords
Another important SEO metric to consider is the number of keywords your site ranks for. This will show you where you are in terms of search engine performance. It shows your overall search engine visibility, which is how many search queries do you appear in the results for.
It may be beneficial to concentrate on your site's top 100 ranking keywords or the top 50 or top 30. While it's true that a term on the eighth or ninth page is unlikely to get any clicks, this isn't always the case. We're looking at total visibility, so those keywords have the potential to improve in ranking.
However, if you're simply interested in how many terms are generating clicks, the top 30 can be a better measure for you. Eventually, you want to see increased exposure over time.
It's also crucial to maintain track of your ranking patterns. How often do you lose keyword rankings, and which ones have firmly established themselves in the top ten?
9. Number of Pages in Google
The total number of pages indexed from your website is one of the most crucial metrics to keep track of. One of the most fundamental duties of SEO is to ensure that new pages are indexed by Google and other search engines when you publish new material for your website.
Web pages that are poorly written or duplicated may take longer to be indexed if they are ever indexed at all. Simply type "site:yourwebsitename.com.au" into the Google search bar, and Google will return a list of every page on your domain name that it has indexed.
Implementing an SEO Strategy That Outperforms Industry Standards
Here is how to get started with benchmarking your SEO;
1. Installing the Important Softwares
a). Google Analytics
Google Analytics should be placed on every website so that visitors may be tracked. You may track organic search engine traffic and the value it brings to your website using Google Analytics.
b). Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is responsible for some of the following benchmarks and SEO information. The Google Search Console is a free marketing tool that lets you monitor how well your website performs in Google's search results.
c). Bing Webmaster Tools
You may use Bing Webmaster Tools to measure organic search traffic from the Microsoft search network.
2. Set Up Conversion Data
Total conversions and total conversion value are two of the most important SEO metrics to watch out for. To do so, you need to set up goals for our Key Performance Indicators.
