When you’re really serious about living a healthy life, there’s a lot you have to keep an eye than just simply your weight on any given day. You’re going to have to pay attention to your body mass index, your body fat percentage and how much calories you’ve burned after each workout. If that’s not plentiful enough, you also want to keep a very close eye on your sugar/carbohydrate and your salt intake per meal as there’s only so much of those you can consume each day if you want to stay on course. Any excessive intake would require more time in the gym and unless you’re a masochist, it’s likely not going to be something to look forward to.

What I’m trying to say here is that in most of life’s pursuits, there’s going to be a number of parameters that you want to familiarize yourself with to measure how well, or badly, you’re doing and this philosophy isn’t just strictly limited to our bodies as can be seen in the world of SEO. The acronym stands for search engine optimization but what exactly are you optimizing for? I mean sure, search engine is right there in the title but which part of the search engine specifically? Before you could even begin to consider committing to an SEO strategy, it might be a good idea first to familiarize yourself with the basic metrics of SEO by getting in touch with Melbourne SEO services that knows what they’re doing or by proceeding onward with this starter pack.

Defining what success looks like

Earlier this year, I went out to celebrate a close friend’s promotion to Engineering Manager in a relatively well-known local startup. Despite graduating with the same electrical engineering degree many, many moons ago, the paths that my little circle of three have chosen in our career couldn’t be more different. One friend decided to strike out and worked for a fashion company straight out of college before circling back and decided to get a Master’s in Engineering before getting that position as a Manager. Another just quit their job as a Product Engineer and is now doing freelance work as a graphic designer. For my part, I’ve worked as a Network Engineer for 3 years since graduating before I began writing professionally in 2018 and is now about to start working for a media company in less than a month.

All three of us are at wildly different positions in life and yet in all of our conversations since, all three of us agreed that we are more or less where we’re supposed to be. And yet, I’m sure that for a number of people, I’m not exactly what they would call a rousing success. I went from having a very comfortable job as a Network Engineer to being a lower paid writer, a position that isn’t exactly secure given the fact that there are a lot of media companies out there that are suffering from financial difficulties in one way or another. This is because everyone defines and measures success differently and that you should focus on reaching the goals you’ve set out for yourself.

In the world of SEO, this can be especially important because if you’ve ever checked out the interface of Google Analytics, you must’ve noticed at least a dozen different technical terms that are all important in their own right. However, some of those metrics might carry more or less relevance to you depending on what you’re looking for at any given moment. It’s simply a matter of efficiency, of focusing your resources only on the things that matters. To help you sort out your priorities, here are 4 basic metrics in SEO that you might want to familiarize yourself with when measuring the success of your SEO strategy.

Organic traffic

Look far and wide across the internet for similar articles on SEO metrics and I’m willing to bet that 90% of those lists will start with organic traffic and justifiably so. Organic traffic, defined as the number of visitors to your site that arrives by way of search engines without the use of paid ads, is widely considered to be the ultimate goal in SEO but not always. If your website relies on clicks and traffics for income, as is the case with the typical blogs, then yes, organic traffic might be your ultimate goal. However, if you’re using your website simply as a gateway, as is the case with e-commerce platforms, organic traffic comes second to the issue of conversion. It’s still important but definitely not your topmost priority.

Organic conversion rate

If organic traffic is the equivalent of getting a match on Tinder then organic conversion is the equivalent of you getting a date with said match. Organic traffic is fine if your primary goal is to simply show off your matches to the people in your life but if you have something more in mind then obviously you’re not going to stop there. For an e-commerce platform, you obviously want there to be actual exchange of money and it’s this exchange that the organic conversion rate measures. Basically, it’s a parameter that measures just much sale you’ve generated from organic traffic and this measure could prove to be absolutely irrelevant for some websites while being hugely important to others.

Organic bounce rate

Still going with the Tinder analogy, bounce rate would be the number of people who proceeded to unmatch you after the initial exchange. Typically, bounce rate is a sign that while your website looks to be interesting on the surface, it doesn’t have what users are looking for. This could mean that the content of the website isn’t an ideal match with the keyword or that they’re not all that interesting in the first place. However, it could also mean that the user was only looking for a specific thing and they went straight for the exit after they found what they were looking for. For this metric, I would advise businesses to check bounce rate for each landing page to see if there’s anything that could be improved on your part.

Your search rankings

Digging through your search rankings can be especially useful to see which keywords are working well for you and which keywords aren’t. This data can be particularly useful as a foundation to base your SEO strategies on as this allows you to focus more on keywords that you might be optimizing for but haven’t ranked well yet. Typically, even if you haven’t done any meaningful SEO campaign yet, your website should still be ranked naturally for certain keywords so this metric can be particularly useful for those who are just starting out on SEO as this information allows you the opportunity to decide where you should be focusing on your efforts.