We all know that when you work on your site’s SEO (or hire a Melbourne SEO agency for SEO services), you’re specifically aiming to get your desired keywords to show up on Google and increase your search ranking over time.
But did you know that improving SEO also benefits other important website metrics? Here are five metrics in particular that you might see significant improvements in once you increase your SEO search rankings:
Pages / Session
The pages per visit (or PPV) metric measures how many pages a user consumes per visit to your website. Ideally you want them to view several pages because that shows an elevated interest in the content you’ve produced, which indicates that you have quality content.
Make it easy for users to consume more pages on your site by organizing your pages and content in a logical way. This should already be part of your SEO strategy, but in case it’s not: one really effective thing you can do is include internal links on all of your pages to other relevant pages from your website. Extensive internal linking creates a thick web of information that Google looks favorably on when it ranks a website for certain keywords, with the added bonus of making it easier for users to continue clicking through your website.
Avg. Session Duration
The amount of time a user spends on your site is related to the number of pages they visit, so the SEO practice of internal linking will also help improve this metric.
Another way to increase how much time someone spends browsing your site is to generate more robust content. Writing longer blog posts and including more content on your web pages is an excellent way to both rank for more keywords and keep a user on your site for longer.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors that click off your site without engaging with anything at all on it (i.e. they don’t click on any links on your site after clicking onto it). Ideally you want to keep your bounce rate low so that a greater portion of your visitors are engaging with your site and spending more time on it.
The best way to do this? Create quality content that’s worth sticking around for. Coincidentally, this is the best way to get in Google’s graces and move up in search rankings.
Crawl Errors
In the Search Console in Google Webmaster Tools, there’s a section that tracks your site errors. You should check this regularly to ensure your site is up and running smoothly. Crawl errors in particular are relevant to SEO because if Google can’t crawl your site, it can’t rank it for your keywords.
If you are using a tool like Moz or SEMrush, they should alert you to any crawl errors on your website. Or if you’ve engaged an SEO agency for their SEO services, it should be their responsibility to fix these errors and ensure they’re resolved so that your site content is available for Google to crawl and rank.
Click-Through Rate
This one applies to those who have an active advertisement on Google AdWords. Click-through rate (CTR) denotes how well your ads and keywords are performing – that is, how often users click on your ad (clicks divided by impressions). From an SEO perspective, improving the content and optimisation of your landing page can help increase your ad’s click-through rate.