Web Site Metrics

A metric is used to measure something. In SEO we want to measure the effect of the changes we are making to the website to know we are doing the right things. Ranking used to be seen as a sign that SEO was working and we would rejoice whenever a key-phrase would reach that page one, position one ranking. With the advent of personal search, ranking becomes less reliable as a factor of success. However, there are many other metrics that can be applied.

Business Metrics

Business metrics are by far the most important measures of success. The reason you are paying for SEO or using your SEO knowledge is often the means to an end.

• ROI – Return On Investment. The percentage difference in the amount you have spent to the money you have made.

• sales – if you can quantify the amount of product sold as a result of improvements made to a site this could be a useful metric.
• leads – some website do not sell products but instead refer people to another service on which they make money. Lead may not lead to sales however.
• conversions – a lead that make money is a known as a conversion but conversions don’t have to have a monetary value. A conversion can be any desired action performed as a result of the website it might be signing up for a newsletter for example.

Usability Metrics

• repeat visitors – an extremely important and often overlooked measure of success. If you can establish large amounts repeat traffic then it is a strong indicator that people like your site. This is particularly important for blogs where there can be a strong relationship between the reader and the author.
• bounce rate – a low bounce rate broadly indicates that you are providing useful information to your visitors. If people come to your site and then just go to another site without having looked at any other pages in the site you might have a problem. Of course it could be argued that if the page does provide what the visitor is looking for it has satisfied the query and the visitor moves on. It has also been speculated that bounce rate was a factor in the search algorithm. Given that bounce rate can be interpreted in either way, it would provide a noisy source of data.
• number of page views per visitor – your content should be so interesting that visitors enter the page and wander to other pages of the site.
• time on page – generally, a longer time spent on a page can be seen as interest in the content, however this is true up to a point, it could also indicate a usability problem.
• time on site – concomitant with number of pages viewed.
• cart/form abandonment – if this is high it can be a sign that your forms are too long or complicated. If this is the case it will also impact on business metrics.
• internal searches what searches are people making on your site, it could indicate new products lines to sell.

SEO Metrics

• PageRank – the importance of a page determined by the number of links pointing to it and the importance of the pages that point links to it. Toolbar PageRank is much more course reflection of this. Toolbar PR is wildly inaccurate, frequently altered due to penalties for link selling and not updated very frequently. It should be regarded as just a bit of fun. The true PageRank is an important factor but we don’t get to see it and we don’t know how it has been modified since it publication in the original paper.
• MozRank – an attempt at providing true PageRank like metrics -similar to PageRank but shows a precision to 2 dp. Calculating this information takes an incredible amount of information. Basically crawling the entire internet and getting the links from every single page. Differences in PageRank and MozRank could occur because of the difference in size between the two datasets or because there are unknown modifications in the Google PageRank calculation.
• Alexa – toolbar provides information on visitors throughout the world but its users are self-selecting and may not represent a fair cross-section of the internet users. Can also be gamed quite easily to increase
• Compete – only measure traffic from US.
• number of backlinks – use Yahoo site explorer to see how many backlinks you have, sites like Backlinkwatch.com, also use this data base. More information on this.
• number of pages indexed – this is a crucial measure. If your pages are not being indexed then obviously you’re not going to getting any traffic. Advanced search modifiers can be used to find this information.
• traffic – every site should be using Analytics to track its visitor numbers, can find out which keywords.
• Google Cache date – can indicate whether the site is being regularly crawled by Googlebot.
• Googlebot search engine frequency can be checked in webmaster tools to find out when the last time the pages were spidered.

Social Media Metrics

Perhaps the weakest form of metric as social media is still more about entertainment rather than a search to find something. It is a good source of traffic and which may result in links. What things can you measure in social media space?

Twitter Metrics

• Twitter – number of followers you have to your blog
• Tunkrank – how influential your tweets are based on a PageRank like algorithm.
• your tweet worth – just a bit of fun.
• ratio of following to number of followers. The more followers you have to following could be considered to be some basic measure of influence.
• re-tweet numbers – can be estimated by searching for the tiny-URL in Twitter search.

SocialBook Marks

• social bookmarks – Add this gives Analytics like statistics on the number of people that bookmark your blog posts and which of the many services they used.

Blog Metrics

• If you run a blog, then the number of comments you receive is a good indicator of repeat visitors and interest in your topic.

• RSS subscribers. Feedburner is the most popular and provides statistical information on the number of subscribers and reach , the number of people that come to read your posts.

Conclusion

You don’t drive your car be just looking at the speedometer and you shouldn’t assess your website on one metric. They are frequently interlinked and it is only be looking a broad spectrum of results that you can get a clear picture of what is happening to your site.