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As a marketer, we love SEO.

There is so much data that you can read on your website how many website visitors you had, where they came from and whether they chose your offer or not. Marketers = data hoarders, which makes SEO a very, very entertaining part of our job.

Give us the data and we'll use it to create a marketing strategy, while keeping track of the key metrics that help us achieve it.

But what are these metrics?

Let's take a look at the 8 key metrics to keep track of your SEO ranking when you first get started.

# 1: Organic traffic

Okay, let's start with the obvious. To know if the time you spend on your SEO strategy is worth it, you need to know what your organic traffic metrics look like. Organic traffic is the number of website visitors who come to your website from a search. They didn't pay to be there or redirected them to another website. You found these visitors by clicking on the search on Google. 🔍

Your organic traffic metric is sooo important because it gives you an overview of how well you rank and what works best for you.

You can use Google Analytics (free!) To display your organic search sessions, new users, bounce rate and page duration.

# 2: The keywords you rank for

There are two types of keyword rankings that you are interested in when it comes to SEO. We'll explain the first one, the keyword you're ranking here, and the second type below. This metric indicates which keyword you currently rank for – whether you like it or not.

For example, an e-commerce office supplies company could rank for notebooks without having made serious efforts to rank for the key phrase “notebooks”. This is great because notebooks are definitely a product they sell, and it gives them a starting point to say what else we want to rank for.

You can use the Google Search Console to determine which keywords your website currently stands for.

# 3: The keywords you want to rank for

But what about the keywords you want to rank for? In our example above, the office supply e-commerce company probably wants to get a rank for … "office supplies". Notebooks are great and fit in their niche, but the “office supplies” ranking could make a big difference to your business.

For this reason, you want to track the keywords you want to rank for. You should do a deep dive to see how many searches specific keywords have per month, and then carefully review those search results to see where they are.

You can use a tool like SearchVolume.io or Keywords Everywhere to find the search volume for a keyword. Then you can find out which keywords are worth using your time and energy for the ranking.

# 4: Alexa ranking

We'll quickly pull a Gary Vee and remind you that voice search is a BIG THING. A voice search ranking (depending on your industry) can lead to monumental results for your business. Ranking for your ideal keywords on Google is important, and ranking on Alexa is the next step.

48 percent of consumers in an Adobe survey said they used language to search the web. Of these 48%, 85% used voice on their cell phones and 39% used it on their Amazon Alexa or Google Home. Even if the voice doesn't seem like a big deal to you now, it's worth checking how it could be a big deal in the future.

Tools like Alexa.com offer you SEO analysis, competitive website analysis, keyword research information, and more, depending on how important your Alexa search ranking is.

# 5: backlinks to your website compared to competitors

Tracking your backlinks gives you an idea of ​​how good your content is. If it's really damn good content, you'll notice a lot of free backlinks. However, if you keep track of your competitor's backlinks, you can see what YOUR really damn good content is and where you are missing the mark.

If you see a lot of backlinks to a particular blog post, this is a good sign. The article is valuable enough for other websites to cite it in its content, which increases your article in the search rankings. (Oh yes, oh yes!) 🎉

With a tool like Moz, you can display backlinks to your website in the Google Search Console and backlinks to your competitors.

# 6: page speed

This is one of those metrics that sounds like something you listed at the bottom of your SEO to-do list – but in reality it should be one of the first. The side speed will have a big impact on your bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who clicked from your website a few seconds after visiting. This rate is a negative indicator for Google that your content is not what you were looking for. This means that Google wants to find someone to replace you in the rankings.

Your bounce rate is not only affected by page speed, but nowadays Google will lower your SEO ranking if your page speed is slow. As a rule of thumb, the page speed is less than 2 seconds.

You can use Google's Page Speed ​​Insights to display the page speed of each of your web pages.

# 7: Social traffic

Tracking your social traffic is necessary for a company that puts time, money, and effort into a social media strategy. If your call to action on Instagram doesn't turn followers into website visitors, it's time to rethink your social media strategy.

Your social traffic shows you how many website visitors come from social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. By tracking these metrics, you can see how well your social strategy is working, how well a campaign is working, or what type of social media offerings are driving your website traffic.

Google Analytics shows you how many website visitors came from social media channels.

# 8: Organic conversions

Ahh, last but not least – organic conversions. How many website visitors that you found through a Google search choose your offer? We saved this for the last time as this metric will define your future SEO strategy. Having 100,000 monthly website visitors is incredible … but only if you can convert at least 10% of them into subscribers or customers.

Organic conversions let you see how well your content is converting website visitors into email subscribers, motivating them to choose a lead magnet, or buying a Tripwire offer.

Google Analytics lets you set conversion goals to see how well your content is converting traffic.

SEO seems big and scary, but if we just look at how many times we've mentioned FREE Google tools that help your SEO rankings (6!), We have to honor them to help us.

Google wants your content to rank well, use these metrics to keep your SEO strategy up to date and see where you can do better.