Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
As someone who has been involved in search engine optimization (SEO) for nearly a decade now, I know how important it is to track metrics. While not every metric has the same value, it is essential to keep your finger on the pulse of your online performance.
From my observations and practical experience, there are a few SEO metrics that really matter in 2024. Specifically, these can be divided into on-page and off-page ones. Nevertheless, they will be crucial for your concerted efforts to ensure you skyrocket your SEO performance.
So, without further ado, here are the metrics I measure and keep tabs on and recommend for highly effective SEO endeavors.
Related: Experts Share The 5 Things You Need to Understand About SEO in 2024
Keyword research and analysis
I’d like to kick off by mentioning the importance of keyword research and analysis. This should be the foundation of any SEO strategy. However, choosing the right keywords can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.
This is where using the right tools comes into play. And once you have these tools at your fingertips, you need to use them wisely. Whether you are creating a sales page or a blog article, you must consider your users’ search intent when looking for the right keywords.
A sales page with informational search intent keywords will flop. The same is true for a blog article with keywords that have a commercial search intent. Match the right keywords with your specific content type. For example, a commercial page should have keywords with commercial search intent and a blog article should have keywords with informational search intent.
After you have narrowed down your list of keywords, created your content and published it, you need to track performance. Analyzing keyword data is essential to inform your SEO strategies. Measure aspects such as search engine rankings, keyword rankings, overall organic traffic and other criteria to ensure you are on the right path.
Page speed and mobile-friendliness
The impact of page speed on SEO is huge. Many, if not most, online users feel a sense of frustration when they click on a page and it takes more than three seconds to open. In our world of instant gratification, people want fast-loading websites that are easy to navigate. Wondering how to optimize your page speed performance? A few tips worth considering include:
Compress your images
Avoid hosting videos locally
Use a quality hosting plan
Avoid too many animations
Minimize external resources
Minimize HTTP requests
Enable GZIP compression
Utilize accelerated mobile pages
Reduce the number of redirects
A related page speed factor is ensuring your website is mobile-friendly. Yes, our world is becoming increasingly mobile-first, and if your website doesn’t flow and show smoothly on mobile, you’ve just frustrated your users and lost them to the competition. So, basically, with these strategies, you can keep your website loading speed low and watch user satisfaction increase as you track this metric.
Related: 8 Ways to Make Your Website Faster (and Why It Is Critical to Your Business)
Content quality and relevance
Measuring content quality and relevance can be a tough nut to crack. Despite this, it’s still important to do so. There are several metrics in this space that I always keep an eye out for. These include:
Traffic
Bounce rate
Dwell time
Social shares
Backlinks (for more on this, see my discussion below)
Conversions
Revenue and/or return on investment
Every one of these metrics, when looked at as a whole, will tell you whether your content resonates with your target audience. Another aspect I consider in this regard is not only publishing fresh content but also updating older articles to ensure that my website or my clients’ websites perform optimally at any given period of time. Bear in mind that SEO is a long-term game. It’s an ongoing process that requires continued and dedicated efforts for overall success.
Link building and authority
And now I come to the crown jewel of SEO: link building. Getting backlinks to your website from other authoritative websites has been described by many in the industry as securing a vote of confidence in the quality of your online presence. But there are good backlinks and bad backlinks. That’s why key metrics to monitor when it comes to your backlink profile should include:
When it comes to how to build high-quality backlinks, there are many strategies that you can follow. However, I recommend the skyscraper approach, resource link exchanges and a few subcategories of outreach such as guest posting. Ultimately, you want your online presence to dominate. And to achieve this, you need to show that you are credible, authoritative and importantly — trustworthy.
Conversion rates and user experience
Measuring conversion rates involves a bit of an analytical approach. In a nutshell, it’s a numbers game. However, measuring the user experience goes beyond numbers and ventures over into the qualitative sphere. Both of these metrics are important for SEO. And while conversion rates can be easily measured by the number of new customers your business has acquired, your users’ experience can be measured by using the following approaches:
Ultimately, when it comes to boosting your SEO efforts in order to drive conversions through a great user experience, you will want to implement A/B testing and carry out different experiments to ensure that your approach is as refined as possible.
Related: User Experience Is the Most Important Metric You Aren’t Measuring
And that’s it, folks: the key SEO metrics that matter in 2024. I can’t overemphasize the importance of tracking and optimizing your SEO metrics for your entrepreneurial success. After all, if you have an online presence, you need to build, nurture and grow it to reap the benefits.
With this in mind, if you haven’t yet started tracking some of these metrics, it’s important to do so while coupling the metrics measurements with a combination of the right SEO strategies and approaches. The rewards for your business and online presence will be phenomenal.
