Measuring SEO Success

When creating and optimizing it for Google’s SERP (and subsequent search engines), one must know how to measure whether or not the efforts were worth it or in vain. This is where metrics, my personal favorite part of SEO, comes into play. Below ar 5 different metrics you can use to effectively optimize your website:

1. Conversions: A simple metric that simply tracks how many people ‘convert’ to your site. Whether this means sales, signups, or simply those who visit your site, conversions is a simple way to track if your work is working.
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Customer liftime value is a prediction as to how much money you will gain from a single customer over their lifetime with the company. Whether it is one major purchase or thousands of small ones, it is a simple formula to predict which customer base you should target.
3. Return on Investment(ROI): As it mentions, this metric is simply if the inputs you have thrown into optimization are less than the outputs you gain. This could be total sales, online sales, or something else appropriate for your site.
4. Backlinks: Backlinks are a metric that shows which websites have added yours as a link. This is good to know so that you can see if your site is viewed as credible by others in the industry. This would show that your optimization is so good, others want to tether their credibility to yours.
5. Click-Through-Rate(CTR): This is a trickier metric to show. While it is easy to get the number for how many clicks a user commits to on a session (another great metric), it is hard to see the optimization efforts paying off in this number. But, if someone initially clicks on your site, either through a search engine or another site, it may be by accident, but the more clicks one has, the more purposeful that session becomes.

These are just a simple list of metrics that you could use, but there are countless more to employ. Knowing whether or not your site is actually optimizes is only shown after you do the work, but making sure this work is working is found simply by metrics.