9 SEO Metrics You Need to Measure When Launching a New Website

– When you're getting anew website off the ground, knowing exactly what to measure will make or break your success.

But with all the metricsthat 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 tobreak down 9 SEO metrics that you need to measurewhen launching a new website.

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The first metric that youneed to monitor is load time.

It has a huge effect onSEO and user experience will make or break your website's success.

You know, I was readingan interesting article that was breaking downsome stats from Walmart.

Did you know that everysecond that they saw in load time improvement, they saw roughly a 1 or 2% increase in conversions? That's not bad, something'sbetter than nothing, right? So load time not only affectsyour search engine rankings but it can also affectyour conversion rates.

The second metric thatyou 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, thenyou'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 andan introduction to SEO and I break down all the factors of SEO such as things like link building.

Well, if I was to have anarticle on link building, I'll link to that articleand 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 workingand what's not working.

You'll have some pagesthat hit it out of the park and you'll have some pagesthat just do terrible.

You want to take the pagesthat are doing extremely well and figure out, all right, what do all these pages have in common? Go look at all the pagesthat aren't performing well, what do they have in common? This will give the idea ofwhat 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 yougoing back to your site or your friends going back to your site.

As your site grows and youstart getting some traffic from other sources, you'll find that you have barelyany returning visitors.

But as you grow yourbrand, you'll find that your returning visitorcount 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'regetting all these visits but you can't figure howto get any of them back, ensure your trafficking, maybe it can just be growing month over month.

It's growing becauseyou're adding new people, you have a big leaky bucket.

You need to solve that becausethe easiest way to grow is retain the people thatare already on your site.

And you can do a few things to get people back to your site such as, collect emails so you canemail 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 youto look at: referral traffic.

Organic traffic won't begreat 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 bestreferring traffic sources will help you fine tuneyour marketing strategy.

I look at referring trafficfor two main reasons.

One, the more referringtraffic I'm getting, usually that means themore backings I'm getting which means overalltime, my organic traffic is going to increase.

Secondly, I like to see which sites cause the most conversionscause 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'tconvert into sales is useless.

The next metric I want youto track is organic traffic.

In the early days you'renot going to rank for much so what you want to do is youwant to look for your rankings and if they're climbing up.

So you may be in the 100sspot, then you go to the 50, then you go to 10, andas 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 notjust each individual keyword, because you can see as a whole, are you getting moretraffic or less traffic.

You can do this throughGoogle Search Console or you can sign up for Ubersuggest and it can track your rankings as well as your search trafficon a daily basis for you.

That will give you idea of what's working, what's not, what keywordsare driving impressions, what pages are workingso you get a good idea of what you should do more of andwhat you should do less of.

The next thing I want youto track: bounce rate.

For organic traffic, anythingaround 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 interlinkingyour pages together, you're going to have a higher bounce rate.

Bounce rate is important metric to measure because it tells you whatusers think of your website.

If you have a low bounce rate that means they likethe 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 themost amount of people but it'll bring in a lotof your paying users, your customers, your subscribers.

Whether you're selling parts or services, emails are effective.

I was once talking to thepresident of Overstock.

com which is a publicly traded company and he told me emails areone of their best channels and I worked with a lotof Fortune 1000 companies at my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital, and we found that emailsare 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 youto track: pages per session.

Look, if people are coming to your site and they're sticking aroundfor two, three, four, five pages per session, that's good.

If they're sticking toone point something, that's pretty low.

Look at the behaviorflow in Google Analytics to see exactly whereusers 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 ofthe 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 growingyour 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.

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