Crucial SEO and Conversion Metrics You Need to Track in 2019 and Beyond
Search continues to evolve, and this 2019, new updates, services, and tools aim to continue its optimization. With mobile and voice search having more impact than before, optimization on these platforms continues to be one of the main concerns in the world of SEO.
Along with mobile and voice, conversion rate optimization remains a constant metric to watch, as it is key to generating sales and revenue to any business website. Tracking this data helps you get an idea of how successful your efforts and strategies are, and also showing how to improve them as well. 2019 is another year that brings in big changes to SEO, and here are the key metrics that you should keep track this year, and maybe even beyond.
Subscriber Size and User Retention
One of the best ways to drive more traffic to your website content is by having a steady and growing subscriber base. Subscription keeps users regularly informed that new content has been released by a website, thus bringing in traffic. Subscription helps user retention grow, which plays a huge part in traffic growth. Some of the biggest websites utilize their subscription base very well, which has helped them establish their online presence, thanks in large part to their loyal user base.
Email and social media marketing are two great ways to grow your subscription base, as you can create sizeable campaigns that will help you gain more users. We have covered this in previous articles, and it is worth taking a look at them again to see how to create them successfully. While establishing a user base takes a lot of time and quality content to accomplish, it is a long-term investment worth making that will surely pay dividends in the end.
Mobile Search Ranking
Mobile search is constantly growing over the past year, with more people using mobile internet, and with the increasing popularity of voice search. In fact, there are cases in which mobile traffic constitutes half of the overall traffic of certain websites, which is something that would not be as common a few years ago.
This makes mobile optimization a must if you haven’t done it yet, as it makes your website accessible for different kinds of mobile devices, without sacrificing content and other features, which were some of the more persistent issues in the past. With search engines like Google incorporating voice search, mobile search rankings are crucial to track how users find your website and find the best search terms that would generate more traffic.
Page Loading Speed
The Google Speed update during July 2018 made mobile loading speed a ranking factor, which led to numerous websites optimizing accordingly. With this in mind, each second truly counts, as it makes a huge difference in the user experience. A few extra seconds can hamper the experience, and lead to users moving on to other websites, which no website owner would want.
Google Lighthouse and the PageSpeed Insights tool allows you to check loading speed and find any issue that is affecting loading speed. AMP is also another time-saver, as it creates fast loading pages. With increasing internet speed, having a website that performs well makes a huge difference in creating the best user experience.
Conversion Rate
A conversion rate is one of the most important SEO metrics to track, as this is one of your main goals when generating revenue to your website. A good conversion rate shows that you have a website that is optimized well, making sure that users would be guided to the right pages. The key to a good conversion rate is quality content that enables users to take actionable steps and starting the buyer’s journey. The user experience is crucial, as a conversion might be hampered by factors such as broken links and misleading images.
Landing page optimization would make sure that these elements would function properly and help guide users into the buyer’s journey. Conversion rate has always been a crucial SEO metric, and it remains in 2019.
Device Used
With search becoming bigger on mobile, it is important to keep track what kind of device is being used to view your website. This would help if pages within your website need to be optimized to make it flexible for multiple platforms. You can also use this metric to see how many of your email. subscribers view your content through different platforms as well.
Tracking this metric also helps push the need for AMP and Responsive Design on your website, which has become a primary need for every website aiming to achieve good search rankings. Since we’re handling different websites, we get to see a wide variety of data that show how different types of users prefer to view content. Upon viewing the data we have at hand, we can say that mobile is growing much larger month after month.
The main tool to track this metric is Google Analytics, which provides data to view desktop, mobile, and tablet user numbers. You can also view the device that was being used as well, which is additional data that might come in handy when targeting certain audiences. Mobile looks to play a huge part in the future of SEO and tracking this metric would bode well for your website.
Error Pages
One of the most hampering experiences that can happen on a website is when you encounter an error page, which means that you can’t navigate further and access content. Whenever you encounter these pages on your website, it is best to act fast and have it fixed as soon as possible.
Tools like Screaming Frog allow you to crawl over all pages in your website, which helps you find any error page that requires redirection. A good practice would be to have your website crawled on a weekly basis to ensure that any error page would be resolved immediately.
Key Takeaway
There are many metrics and factors that can affect the success of an SEO and conversion strategy, and keeping track of these metrics makes sure that you achieve the most success this 2019, and prepare your website for new and upcoming updates.
If you have questions and inquiries about SEO, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
