Learning how to optimize your website for search engines can be a bit intimidating at first.
Who am I kidding?
After learning it for almost 6 years, I am still intimidated by it.
Want to know why?
It is because Search engines like Google are evolving constantly and so are their guidelines.
With SEO, you can never stop learning. New guidelines are being pumped out every day, and the old ones are becoming obsolete.
Learning the correct implementation of SEO guidelines is a time-consuming process. There are a lot of factors that influence the search engine ratings of your website. Free and paid SEO tools can help you in tracking your process through their SEO metrics.
But to use these SEO tools, first, you need to know what are these SEO metrics and how are they calculated?
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How to track enterprise seo metrics?
To understand how different SEO metrics work, you need to have a basic understanding of how these SEO tools function.
SEO tools like Ahrefs’ SEO tool, SEMRush use robots to crawl the search engine. According to them, they crawl 200 million pages in a single hour.
Many SEO tools crawl the web 24/7, just like Google and other search engines.
These robots collect data from different websites and bring it back to the server. This data is then stored in a way that it’s accessible for millions of users.
The backend infrastructure of these tools helps them in generating and displaying graphs and reports within seconds.
According to Ahrefs, their database constitutes Eighty-Five Trillion rows.
Important SEO KPIs or tracking metrics
SEO is effective because we can measure all the factors that influence it. Measuring all your progress means you can keep learning from your mistakes. If you don’t measure your progress, you’ll never know if you are directing all your hard work in the right direction or not.
Measuring SEO metrics without the help of SEO tools is not possible, especially for those who are just starting.
Measuring your progress using these SEO tools is easy. Different Tools use different abbreviations for their SEO metrics, but in essence, all of them are similar to each other in one way or other.
If you learn to work with one SEO tool, you’ll easily learn about the rest of them as well.
In this article, you’ll learn about the SEO metrics that are crucial for the success of your website.
Search Volume of a keyword
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Search volume is one of the most important factors, if not the most important when it comes to the right keyword selection.
The search volume of a keyword will tell you the number of times this particular keyword is searched for in a country within a month.
All these results are filtered for the United States, you can filter your results for the region you are targeting.
The keyword “money” was searched 526000 times within a month, in the United States.
The keyword “money heist” was searched 293000 times.
One thing you should keep in mind is that a search volume of 526000 doesn’t entail that 526000 people searched for the keyword “money”.
If one person searches the keyword “money” a hundred times, the search volume will increase by one hundred.
There are many keywords whose search volume keeps going up and down throughout the year.
For example, people search for” Christmas ornaments” mostly around Christmas time. In June/July the demand for Christmas ornaments is very low, and thus the search volume for the keyword ”Christmas ornaments” will be very low during those months.
Most keyword tools show the average number of monthly searches from the past 1 or 2 years. For seasonal keywords like “Christmas ornaments”, this information can be very misleading.
You should also keep in mind that some keywords are very popular in some countries and not so much in the other ones.
In the United States, the keyword “Christmas” will be more popular than in India or Pakistan.
By default, most keyword research tools show results for the United States. You can manually change your location to any country you desire.
I compared the search volume of the keyword “car”, for both U.S and Turkey.
You can clearly see the difference in the search volume for both countries.
Many paid keyword research tools also show the global search volume of keywords.
Clicks per search
Click per search represents the search volume of a keyword compared to the number of clicks on its search results.
If I search for “Google net worth”
I’ll get the answer without the need to click on a website.
These quick Answers by Google and other search engines can have an adverse impact on the number of clicks per search of a keyword.
Here is another example of Google’s quick answers.
Anyone who is searching for Gigi Hadid’s height on Google will get the answer right away.
But for more technical topics like “Blockchain signals” and “ERP software,” normally, the number of clicks is higher than their search volume.
Another thing that can impact this number for organic results is paid results.
Paid results are positioned at the top of search results, and thus they are more visible to the users. In some instances, these paid results can steal most of the clicks, leaving only a few for organic results.
For informational topics like ”How to learn Blockchain,” people prefer organic results over paid ones.
Keyword Return Rate
The keyword return rate is the number of times one person searches for a keyword in thirty days.
You can only measure the return rate of a keyword with a couple of SEO tools, Ahrefs being one of them.
A keyword with a return rate of 2.9 will have a higher number of repeated searches than a keyword with a return rate of 2.1.
A return rate of 2 doesn’t mean that an average person searches two times a month for that keyword. It just means that more people are returning for this keyword than a keyword with a return rate of 1.9.
SEO/Keyword Difficulty
SEO tools use the average number of Backlinks to calculate the domain authority for websites ranking in the top 10 search results for a keyword.
These tools then use this domain authority to calculate the SEO/keyword difficulty for a keyword.
SEO tools use backlinks for this calculation because creating quality backlinks is the only way to compete for top ten searches.
SEO difficulty of a keyword ranges from 1-100.
A keyword with SEO difficulty of 1-10 is easy to rank for. As this number increases, so does the difficulty in ranking.
You should always choose keywords that are easier to rank for.
Keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty are hard to find. But once you find them they can be really helpful in increasing the search engine rankings of your website.
Organic Traffic
This metric shows the number of organic clicks your website is getting. Organic traffic means all the visitors you get from search engines. Paid clicks are not included in the calculation of organic traffic.
The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to generate organic traffic, Keeping a track of your progress can help you in the long run.
Evaluating your progress will also help you in knowing if your hard work is bearing any fruit or not.
You can easily keep a track of your organic traffic using your Google Analytics account.
Bottom line
Learning how to optimize your website can be a little time-consuming and confusing at first. But you’ll get better with time. SEO can make a big difference for your website. It can be the key to your success.
Good websites are expensive and if you are spending this much money on your website, you must make sure that people will get to see your website. A website that is optimized for search engines has a greater chance of showing up in relevant search results.
If you are just starting your SEO journey, you should learn some basics first. I hope this article helps you understand SEO metrics a little better than you did before.
What SEO tool do you prefer to use? Share in your comments below
