Got the basics down and now looking for more SEO metrics to keep an eye on? This list will help name and explain 5 more metrics you should be looking at.
You’ve read our article on How to Understand the 5 Most Important SEO Metrics. But now, you want to expand your SEO metric knowledge. Here’s our breakdown of 5 more key SEO metrics, what they mean, and how tracking them can contribute to a successful SEO strategy.
New backlinks and Their Referring Domains
What are backlinks? Backlinks are links on others’ webpages to your own. Referring domains are the domains of those webpages that reference your own; their online addresses.
It doesn’t matter how good the content on your webpage is if no-one sees it. Imagine two pages with identical on-page metrics and identical quality content – the one with more and better quality referring domains will undoubtedly have a higher traffic rate.
However, the reverse is also true. Improvements to your SEO rates will drive up the number of popular and good quality external sites that link to your content. External sites will see yours ranking highly and tend to refer to your content over that which is lower ranking.
So keeping track of your backlinks and referring domains will give you an idea of how fruitful your latest SEO efforts are.
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Domain Authority
Domain authority is a logarithmic scale developed by Moz that predicts the search engine ranking position of a website (domain).
A high domain authority number will indicate a higher predicted ability to rank well in search engine results.
Domain authority can also be used alongside tracking backlinks and referring domains; referring domains with a high domain authority score means they are higher quality, and preferable to have when wanting to drive up traffic.
Page Speed
A slow webpage will seriously up your bounce rate. You know how frustrating it is to click on an intriguing link or ad, only to have the page take what seems like hours to load. Most likely you’ll have clicked away from it before it did.
Page speed and site speed are different. Page speed is measured in two ways: the time it takes to load all the content on the page in full, and how long it takes a browser to receive the first byte of your page. Site speed is measured using a sample of pages’ rates on your site.
Page speed might be more important to your SEO, however, as search engine results will often display a page of your site as a result rather than the whole site or a general landing page.
A slow page speed will increase your bounce rate and likely decrease your search engine ranking. If your page speed is slower than optimal, consider reformatting, and taking out the slowest-to-load elements in favour of more manageable ones.
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Crawl Errors
A search engine cannot rank a webpage without first being able to read it.
When a search engine tries to crawl a page or site with multiple missing pages, broken links, and general technical errors, problems will arise. These issues will likely even prevent a page from ranking at all in a search.
Improve your site’s search engine readability by keeping track of and fixing crawl errors as and when they appear.
Mobile Traffic
Nearly 60% of internet searches are done via mobile devices. It’s more important than ever to make sure your site is mobile-optimised.
Comparing your mobile to overall traffic can be a useful endeavour. If your overall traffic increases while your mobile traffic does not, or your mobile traffic only accounts for a small portion of your total traffic, this could be an indication that your site isn’t very mobile friendly.
If your comparative traffic rates are pointing to low numbers of mobile visitors, it’s time to invest in mobile optimisation.
Conclusion
So keep an eye on these metrics to deepen your understanding of your SEO result. From this, you will know where to focus your efforts going forward! SEO metrics can be crucial to developing a successful online business.
For more information regarding SEO and online businesses, contact the team at Floodmaker today!