- When you're getting a new website off the ground,
knowing exactly what to measure
will make or break your success.
But with all the metrics that Google Analytics
and other platforms offer, it's easy to get lost.
So, you know what?
Today I'm going to keep it simple.
That way you can succeed.
Hi everyone, I'm Neil Patel
and today, I'm going to break down 9 SEO metrics
that you need to measure when launching a new website.
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The first metric that you need to monitor is load time.
It has a huge effect on SEO and user experience
will make or break your website's success.
You know, I was reading an interesting article
that was breaking down some stats from Walmart.
Did you know that every second that they saw
in load time improvement, they saw roughly a 1
or 2% increase in conversions?
That's not bad, something's better than nothing, right?
So load time not only affects your search engine rankings
but it can also affect your conversion rates.
The second metric that you need to keep track of
is dwell time or at least average
session duration in Google Analytics.
If people like your content,
they'll spend more time consuming it.
If they don't, then you're kind of screwed.
And a simple way that you can improve this
is crosslinking your content together.
So for example, if I have an article
that breaks down SEO and an introduction to SEO
and I break down all the factors of SEO
such as things like link building.
Well, if I was to have an article on link building,
I'll link to that article and that will help
with this metric.
The next metric is average time on page.
Check this metric off for individual pages
to see what's working and what's not working.
You'll have some pages that hit it out of the park
and you'll have some pages that just do terrible.
You want to take the pages that are doing extremely well
and figure out, all right,
what do all these pages have in common?
Go look at all the pages that aren't performing well,
what do they have in common?
This will give the idea of what you should do more of
and what you should do less of.
The next metric I want you to look at
is percentage of returning visitors
and the early days, especially when your website
is brand new, what you'll find out is
you'll have a ton of returning visitors.
Because that will be you going back to your site
or your friends going back to your site.
As your site grows and you start getting some traffic
from other sources, you'll find
that you have barely any returning visitors.
But as you grow your brand, you'll find that
your returning visitor count will continually
go up and up and up.
In the early days you'll live and die
by returning visitor numbers.
For example, if you're getting all these visits
but you can't figure how to get any of them back,
ensure your trafficking, maybe it can just be
growing month over month.
It's growing because you're adding new people,
you have a big leaky bucket.
You need to solve that because the easiest way to grow
is retain the people that are already on your site.
And you can do a few things to get people
back to your site such as,
collect emails so you can email people every time
you have updates or new content.
Do push notifications, that way every time
you have a message to send out.
You can also leverage messenger chats
such as MobileMonkey or minichat.
The next metric I want you to look at: referral traffic.
Organic traffic won't be great in the beginning
but if you can get referral traffic
in order to get people to your site,
if they're from relevant sites,
you can get sales, conversions.
Knowing what is the best referring traffic sources
will help you fine tune your marketing strategy.
I look at referring traffic for two main reasons.
One, the more referring traffic I'm getting,
usually that means the more backings I'm getting
which means overall time, my organic traffic
is going to increase.
Secondly, I like to see which sites
cause the most conversions cause then I need it to know,
to focus all my efforts on those sites
that are not just driving traffic,
but they're driving sales.
Because traffic that doesn't convert into sales is useless.
The next metric I want you to track is organic traffic.
In the early days you're not going to rank for much
so what you want to do is you want to look for your rankings
and if they're climbing up.
So you may be in the 100s spot, then you go to the 50,
then you go to 10, and as you keep climbing
you'll see your traffic going up as well.
So when you're looking at organic traffic,
look at the total number not just each individual keyword,
because you can see as a whole,
are you getting more traffic or less traffic.
You can do this through Google Search Console
or you can sign up for Ubersuggest
and it can track your rankings
as well as your search traffic on a daily basis for you.
That will give you idea of what's working,
what's not, what keywords are driving impressions,
what pages are working so you get a good idea of
what you should do more of and what you should do less of.
The next thing I want you to track: bounce rate.
For organic traffic, anything around 50% or lower is good,
anything above that level you need to
make improvements to your site.
Bounce rate's not just about the content
but it's about the experience.
If your site loads slow,
you're going to have a higher bounce rate.
If you're not interlinking your pages together,
you're going to have a higher bounce rate.
Bounce rate is important metric to measure
because it tells you what users think of your website.
If you have a low bounce rate
that means they like the stuff on your site.
The next metric: email opt in's.
Email subscribers will be one of
your best source of traffic.
Why?
It won't bring in the most amount of people
but it'll bring in a lot of your paying users,
your customers, your subscribers.
Whether you're selling parts or services,
emails are effective.
I was once talking to the president of Overstock.com
which is a publicly traded company
and he told me emails are one of their best channels
and I worked with a lot of Fortune 1000 companies
at my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital,
and we found that emails are super effective
whether you're a big Fortune 1000 company
or even a small and medium business,
so make sure you're collecting emails.
And on that note, if you need help
with any of your marketing,
check out my agency Neil Patel Digital.
Now another metric I want you to track: pages per session.
Look, if people are coming to your site
and they're sticking around for two, three, four,
five pages per session, that's good.
If they're sticking to one point something,
that's pretty low.
Look at the behavior flow in Google Analytics
to see exactly where users are navigating to.
This will inform you and tell you
what's working and what's not.
This will tell you what you need to do
to get more pages per session.
That behavior flow is one of the best reports that I love
and with it you'll get a better idea
of what changes you need to make.
If you need help growing your site's traffic,
check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital.
Thank you for watching, make sure you subscribe,
like this video, share it and comment
if you have any questions.
I'll look forward to helping you out.