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One of the most beautiful aspects of online marketing is that there are many ways to track success. Sometimes these metrics are relative to the nature of your business and sometimes they are good indicators of how your SEO company is performing in general.

There are so many metrics that you can get from Google Analytics and other sources. It can sometimes lead to information overload. Almost as important as collecting the data, it’s also important to learn how to evaluate the data and metrics to help you make better business decisions.  Let’s examine some other important metrics that will be useful to measuring your SEO success.

Conversion Rate

A conversion can be any action that you define. What is the goal of your website? This can be anything from completing a purchase to generating a lead from a web form. According to Google Analytics support, there can often be two types of conversions: macro conversions and micro conversions. A micro conversion is an activity that can lead someone down the path to purchase. Examples of micro conversions include email newsletter signups, or someone following your company on social media. Examples of macro conversions would be lead form submission or a transaction. Defining a these micro and macro conversions are an essential part of setting up this metric. These can be set up using Google Analytics. Head over to the Conversion page on Google Support for more details.

Once you figure out what defines a conversion for your website, you can begin to track the conversion rate. The conversion rate is the number of visitors that complete a conversion (desired action) out of the number of visitors to your website or page. Furthermore, this can be broken down into segments for SEO, PPC and social efforts to show which marketing efforts are producing the highest conversions. Keep in mind.

Organic Search Traffic

It is important for defining SEO success that you separate all website traffic from organic traffic. Measuring organic search traffic trends can tell you if your SEO has been effective. Gradual increases in organic traffic are a good indicator that your authority and visibility are slowly being built up over time, which is the goal of an SEO campaign. Organic traffic can be segmented in Google Analytics by going under the “acquisition” tab, and selecting “channels” under “all traffic.” There, you can see a breakdown of where your traffic is coming from. Groupings in this segment include organic search, direct, referral, paid search, social, email and other sources. This area of Google Analytics can give you a big picture idea of which of your marketing efforts is bringing the most website traffic.

Keyword Rankings

Measuring keyword rankings is a great way to compare your SEO performance to your competition. It can be a great way to determine what the search engines feel your website is about. It is definitely not a metric that you want to constantly obsess over. Keyword rankings can fluctuate from day to day and depend on many different factors such as website authority, page speed, content, and mobile usability are all factors that can affect keyword rankings. A good SEO company will be able to optimize your website according to best practices surrounding keyword optimization. You also want to make sure that the keywords you choose for your campaign have search volume and are not overly competitive to start with. In other words, make your keywords realistic and work towards the bigger ones later in the campaign, once your authority is built. It is also beneficial to check the conversion rate per keyword. This can show you which keywords are bringing you the most revenue, which is another factor to consider other than which search terms are popular.

While it’s easy to get lost in the amounts of data collection in online marketing, it’s important to be able to evaluate the data and come back with conclusions on what they mean to your business.