Although every business is unique and every website has different
metrics that matter, the following list is nearly universal. Note that
we're only covering those metrics critical to SEO - optimizing for the
search engines. As a result, more general metrics may not be included.
For a more comprehensive look at web analytics, check out
Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators from Avinash Kaushik's excellent
Web Analytics Blog.
Every month, it's critical to keep track of the contribution of each traffic source for your site. These include:
- Direct Navigation: Typed in traffic, bookmarks, email links without tracking codes, etc.
- Referral Traffic: From links across the web or in trackable email, promotion & branding campaign links
- Search Traffic: Queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engine
Knowing both the percentage and exact numbers will help you identify
weaknesses and serve as a comparison over time for trend data. For
example, if you see that traffic has spiked dramatically but it comes
from referral links with low relevance, it's not time to get excited. On
the other hand, if search engine traffic falls dramatically, you may be
in trouble. You should use this data to track your marketing efforts
and plan your traffic acquisition efforts.
Three major engines make up 95%+ of all search traffic in the US -
Google and the Yahoo-Bing alliance. For most countries outside the US
80%+ of search traffic comes solely from Google (with a few notable
exceptions including both Russia and China.) Measuring the contribution
of your search traffic from each engine is critical for several reasons:
Compare Performance vs. Market Share
By tracking not only search engines broadly, but by country, you'll
be able to see exactly the contribution level of each engine in
accordance with its estimated market share. Keep in mind that in sectors
like technology and Internet services, demand is likely to be higher on
Google (given its younger, more tech-savvy demographic) than in areas
like cooking, sports or real estate.
Get Visibility Into Potential Drops
If your search traffic should drop significantly at any point,
knowing the relative and exact contributions from each engine will be
essential to diagnosing the issue. If all the engines drop off equally,
the problem is almost certainly one of accessibility. If Google drops
while the others remain at previous levels, it's more likely to be a
penalty or devaluation of your SEO efforts by that singular engine.
Uncover Strategic Value
It's very likely that some efforts you undertake in SEO will have
greater positive results on some engines than others. For example, we
frequently notice that on-page optimization tactics like better keyword
inclusion and targeting has more benefit with Bing & Yahoo! than
Google, while gaining specific anchor text links from a large number of
domains has a more positive impact on Google than the others. If you can
identify the tactics that are having success with one engine, you'll
better know how to focus your efforts.
The keywords that send traffic are another important piece of your
analytics pie. You'll want to keep track of these on a regular basis to
help identify new trends in keyword demand, gauge your performance on
key terms and find terms that are bringing significant traffic that
you're potentially under optimized for.
You may also find value in tracking search referral counts for terms
outside the "top" terms/phrases - those that are important and valuable
to your business. If the trend lines are pointing in the wrong
direction, you know efforts need to be undertaken to course correct.
Search traffic worldwide has consistently risen over the past 15 years,
so a decline in quantity of referrals is troubling - check for
seasonality issues (keywords that are only in demand certain times of
the week/month/year) and rankings (have you dropped, or has search
volume ebbed?).
When it comes to the bottom line for your organization, few metrics
matter as much as conversion. For example, in the graphic to the right,
5.80% of visitors who reached Moz with the query "SEO Tools" signed up
to become members during that visit. This is a much higher conversion
rate than most of the 1000s of keywords used to find our site. With this
information, we can now do 2 things.
- Checking our rankings, we see that we only rank #4 for "SEO
Tools". Working to improve this position will undoubtedly lead to more
conversion.
- Because our analytics will also tell us what page these visitors landed on (mostly http://moz.com/tools), we can focus on efforts on that page to improve visitor experience.
The real value from this simplistic tracking comes from the
"low-hanging fruit" - seeing keywords that continually send visitors who
convert and increasing focus on both rankings and improving the landing
pages that visitors reach. While conversion rate tracking from keyword
phrase referrals is certainly important, it's never the whole story. Dig
deeper and you can often uncover far more interesting and applicable
data about how conversion starts and ends on your site.
Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an
essential metric for monitoring overall SEO performance. From this
number, we can get a glimpse into indexation - the number of pages the
engines are keeping in their indices from our site. For most large
websites (50,000+ pages), mere inclusion is essential to earning
traffic, and this metric delivers a trackable number that's indicative
of success or failure. As you work on issues like site architecture,
link acquisition, XML Sitemaps, uniqueness of content and meta data,
etc., the trend line should rise, showing that more and more pages are
earning their way into the engines' results. Pages receiving search
traffic is, quite possibly, the best long tail metric around.
While other analytics data points are of great importance, those
mentioned above should be universally applied to get the maximum value
from your SEO campaigns.
Analytics Software
The Right Tools for the Job
Additional Reading:
Metrics for Measuring
Search Engine Optimization
In organic SEO, it can be difficult to track the specific elements of
the engines' algorithms effectively given that this data is not public,
nor is it even well researched. However, a combination of tactics have
become best practices, and new data is constantly emerging to help track
direct ranking elements and positive/negative ranking signals. The data
points covered below are ones that we will occasionally recommend to
track campaigns and have proven to add value when used in concert with
analytics.
Metrics Provided by Search Engines
We've already discussed many of the data points provided by services
such as Google's Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft's
Webmaster Tools. In addition to these, the engines provide some insight
through publicly available queries and competitive intelligence. Below
is a list of queries/tools /metrics from the engines, along with their
respective applications.
Employing these queries & tools effectively requires that you
have an informational need with an actionable solution. The data itself
isn't valuable unless you have a plan of what to change/build/do once
you learn what you need to know (this holds true for competitive
analysis as well).
Google Site Query
e.g., site:moz.com - useful to see the number and list of
pages indexed on a particular domain. You can expand the value by adding
additional query parameters. For example - site:moz.com/blog
inurl:tools - will show only those pages in Google's index that are in
the blog and contain the word "tools" in the URL. While this number
fluctuates, it's still a good rough measurement. You can read more about
this in this
blog post.
Google Trends
Available at Google.com/Trends - this shows keyword search
volume/popularity data over time. If you're logged into your Google
account, you can also get specific numbers on the charts, rather than
just trend lines.
Google Trends for Websites
Available at Trends.Google.com/websites
- This shows traffic data for websites according to Google's data
sources (toolbar, ISP data, analytics and others may be part of this). A
logged in user account will show numbers in the chart to indicate
estimated traffic levels.
Google Insights for Search
Available at google.com/insights/search - this tool provides data about regional usage, popularity and related queries for keywords.
Bing Site Query
e.g., site:moz.com - just like Yahoo! and Google, Bing allows
for queries to show the number and list of pages in their index from a
given site. Unfortunately, Bing's counts are given to wild fluctuation
and massive inaccuracy, often rendering the counts themselves useless.
Bing IP Query
e.g., ip:216.176.191.233 - this query will show pages that
Microsoft's engine has found on the given IP address. This can be useful
in identifying shared hosting and seeing what other sites are hosted on
a given IP address.
Microsoft Ad Intelligence
Available at Microsoft Advertising
- a great variety of keyword research and audience intelligence tools
are provided by Microsoft, primarily for search and display advertising.
This guide won't dive deep into the value of each individual tool, but
they are worth investigating and many can be applied to SEO.
Ask Site Query
e.g., site:moz.com inurl:www - Ask.com is a bit picky in its
requirements around use of the site query operator. To function
properly, an additional query must be used (although generic queries
such as the example above are useful to see what a broad "site" query
would normally return).
Blog Search Link Query
e.g., link:http://moz.com/blog - Although Google's normal web
search link command is not always useful, their blog search link query
shows generally high quality data and can be sorted by date range and
relevance. You can read more about this in this
blog post.
Page Specific Metrics
Page Authority - Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a
single page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page
Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank.
mozRank -
mozRank
refers to Moz’s general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of
global link authority (or popularity). mozRank is very similar in
purpose to the measures of static importance (which means importance
independent of a specific query) that are used by the search engines
(e.g., Google's PageRank or FAST's StaticRank). Search engines often
rank pages with higher global link authority ahead of pages with lower
authority. Because measures like mozRank are global and static, this
ranking power applies to a broad range of search queries, rather than
pages optimized specifically for a particular keyword.
mozTrust - Like mozRank,
mozTrust
is distributed through links. First, trustworthy “seeds” are identified
to feed the calculation of the metric. (These include the homepages of
major international university, media and governmental websites.)
Websites that earn links from the seed set are then able to cast
(lesser) trust-votes through their links. This process continues across
the web and the mozTrust of each applicable link decreases as it travels
"farther" from the original trusted seed site.
# of Links - The total number of pages that contain at least
one link to this page. For example, if the Library of Congress homepage
(http://www.loc.gov/index.html) linked to the White House's homepage
(http://www.whitehouse.gov) in both the page content and the footer,
this would still be counted as only a single link.
# of Linking Root Domains - The total number of unique root
domains that contain a link to this page. For example, if
topics.nytimes.com and www.nytimes.com both linked to the homepage of
Moz (http://moz.com), this would count as only a single linking root
domain.
External mozRank - Whereas mozRank measures the link juice (ranking power) of both
internal and
external links,
external mozRank measures only the amount of mozRank flowing through
external links (links located on a separate domain). Because external
links can play an important role as independent endorsements, external
mozRank is an important metric for predicting search engine rankings.
Domain Specific Metrics
Domain Authority - Domain Authority predicts how well a web
page on a specific domain will rank. The higher the Domain Authority,
the greater the potential for an individual page on that domain to rank
well.
Domain mozRank - Domain-level mozRank (DmR) quantifies the
popularity of a given domain compared to all other domains on the web.
DmR is computed for both
subdomains and
root domains.
This metric uses the same algorithm as mozRank but applies it to the
“domain-level link graph”. (A view of the web that only looks at domains
as a whole and ignores individual pages) Viewing the web from this
perspective offers additional insight about the general authority of a
domain. Just as pages can endorse other pages, a link which crosses
domain boundaries (e.g., from a page on searchengineland.com to a page
on http://moz.com) can be seen as endorsement by one domain for another.
Domain mozTrust - Just as mozRank can be applied at the domain level (
Domain-level mozRank),
so can mozTrust. Domain-level mozTrust is like mozTrust but instead of
being calculated between web pages, it is calculated between entire
domains. New or poorly linked-to pages on highly trusted domains may
inherit some natural trust by virtue of being hosted on the trusted
domain. Domain-Level mozTrust is expressed on a 10-point logarithmic
scale.
# of Links - the quantity of pages that contain at least one
link to the domain. For example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and
http://www.loc.gov/about both contained links to http://www.nasa.gov,
this would count as two links to the domain.
# of Linking Root Domains - the quantity of different domains
that contain at least one page with a link to any page on this site. For
example, if http://www.loc.gov/index.html and http://www.loc.gov/about
both contained links to http://www.nasa.gov, this would count as only a
single linking root domain to nasa.gov.
Applying that Data
To Your Campaign
Just knowing the numbers won't help unless you can effectively
interpret and apply changes to course-correct. Below, we've taken a
sample of some of the most common directional signals provided by
tracking data points and how to respond with actions to improve or
execute on opportunities.
Fluctuation
In Search Engine Page and Link Count Numbers
The numbers reported in "site:" and "link:" queries are rarely
precise, and thus we strongly recommend not getting too worried about
fluctuations showing massive increases or decreases unless they are
accompanied by traffic drops. For example, on any given day, Yahoo!
reports between 800,000 and 2 million links to the SEOmoz.org domain.
Obviously, we don't gain or lose hundreds of thousands of links each
day, but the variability of Yahoo!'s indices means that these numbers
reports provide little guidance about our actual link growth or
shrinkage.
If you do see significant drops in links or pages indexed accompanied
by similar traffic referral drops from the search engines, you may be
experiencing a real loss of link juice (check to see if important links
that were previously sending traffic/rankings boosts still exist) or a
loss of indexation due to penalties, hacking, malware, etc. A thorough
analysis using your own web analytics and
Google's Webmaster Tools can help to identify potential problems.
Falling
Search Traffic from a Single Engine
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- You're under a penalty at that engine for violating search quality or terms of service guidelines. Check out this post on how to identify/handle a search engine penalty.
- You've accidentally blocked access to that search engine's
crawler. Double-check your robots.txt file and meta robots tags and
review the Webmaster Tools for that engine to see if any issues exist.
- That engine has changed their ranking algorithm in a fashion
that no longer favors your site. Most frequently, this happens because
links pointing to your site have been devalued in some way, and is
especially prevalent for sites that engage in manual link building
campaigns of low-moderate quality links.
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Falling
Search Traffic from Multiple Engines
Chances are good that you've done something on your site to block
crawlers or stop indexation. This could be something in the robots.txt
or meta robots tags, a problem with hosting/uptime, a DNS resolution
issue or a number of other technical breakdowns. Talk to your system
administrator, developers and/or hosting provider and carefully review
your Webmaster Tools accounts and analytics to help determine potential
causes.
Individual
Ranking Fluctuations
Gaining or losing rankings for a particular term/phrase or even
several happens millions of times a day to millions of pages and is
generally nothing to be concerned about. Ranking algorithms fluctuate,
competitors gain and lose links (and on-page optimization tactics) and
search engines even flux between indices (and may sometimes even make
mistakes in their crawling, inclusion or ranking processes). When a
dramatic rankings decrease occurs, you might want to carefully review
on-page elements for any signs of over-optimization or violation of
guidelines (cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.) and check to see if links
have recently been gained or lost. Note that with sudden spikes in
rankings for new content, a temporary period of high visibility followed
by a dramatic drop is common (in the SEO field, we refer to this as the
"freshness boost").
“Don't panic over small
fluctuations. With large drops, be wary against making a judgment call
until at least a few days have passed. If you run a new site or are in
the process of link acquisition and active marketing, these sudden
spikes and drops are even more common, so simply be prepared and keep
working.”
Positive
Increases in Link Metrics Without Rankings Increases
Many site owners worry that when they've done some "classic" SEO -
on-page optimization, link acquisition, etc. they can expect instant
results. This, sadly, is not the case. Particularly for new sites,
pages and content that's competing in very difficult results, rankings
take time and even earning lots of great links is not a sure recipe to
instantly reach the top. Remember that the engines need to not only
crawl all those pages where you've acquired links, but index and process
them - given the almost certain use of delta indices by the engines to
help with freshness, the metrics and rankings you're seeking may be days
or even weeks behind the progress you've made.
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