Measuring your SEO efforts can be time consuming and sometimes it can be hard to focus on the right metrics or analyze the right ones. SEO is constantly moving and tracking your changes need to be conducted by data-driven analysis.
We have gathered the technical SEO KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on which you should pay attention and invest your time. They are the ones that will really point out your SEO improvements and help you measure your efforts over time.
5 technical SEO KPIs to monitor
1# Organic Visits
The number of organic visits (or also known as SEO visits) within a given period of time is an important KPI to monitor and one of the most basic one. Before making any SEO adjustments to boost your traffic on your most important pages, you need to monitor the evolution of your organic traffic over time. Your money pages should be the pages driving the more organic traffic and they are the one you want to capitalize on. For an e-commerce websites, the most valuable pages should be the product pages while for a newspaper website, top pages tend to be articles. This is where you want to receive organic visits.
With Oncrawl, you can know how much organic visits you are generating.
But also which group of pages are receiving the most organic traffic.
2# Active page ratio
Knowing the number of organic visits your website is driving is an interesting metric but it does not bring you an comprehensive view of your SEO performance. What proportion of your site is receiving this traffic? Which group of pages receive the highest part of it? Is it your most important groups?
That is why you also need to take into consideration your active page ratio. An active page is a page that drives traffic from organic results in a given period of time and is opposed to inactive pages. Inactive pages don’t generate any SEO visits. The active page ratio does not just tell you how much traffic you are receiving but where it is targeted.
With Oncrawl, you can have a clear understanding of your active page over time.
We also indicate the ratio of active pages among all your crawled pages.
Here you can see that only 30% of your pages are active and generate SEO visits. It is definitely interesting to increase this number.
But it is important to evaluate your active page ratio by group of pages and check if your most important group of pages are the ones that drive you the most qualified traffic. If not, you now have clear insights to take action on.
3# Crawl Ratio
Your crawl ratio is another important technical SEO KPI you should focus on. In order to generate traffic and conversions, your website needs to be crawled by Google.
Oncrawl shows you the number of bots hits, the number of crawled pages and the number of newly crawled pages on a given period of time.
But it is also essential to understand what proportion of your website has been crawled and seen and which pages are concerned. Oncrawl log analyzer lets you know the crawl ratio of your pages and verify if this ratio meets your expectations.
Here you can clearly see that some categories of your website are not crawled very often. Is it done in purpose or are you missing chances to rank your product pages? These data helps you take action to improve your crawl ratio on the pages that matter.
4# Active orphan pages
The active orphan page ratio is another technical SEO KPI to monitor. Why? Because these pages can be highly valuable if optimized. Orphan pages are pages that can’t be find in the internal linking structure but that Google knows. Combining your crawl and logs data lets you uncover this information. If Google knows these pages, he keeps visiting them and potentially wastes his crawl budget on pages that are not primary. In fact, those orphan pages don’t generate that much traffic and no links are pointing back to them. In the example below, the website is wrongly indexed and can’t rank on expected requests. In fact, only 42% of the pages belonging to the structure are crawled while more than 82k pages are regarded as orphans and are crawled by Google.
Identify if those orphan pages are driving traffic. If yes, it could be smart to redirect them and delete the no-index.
5# Near duplicate content ratio
Duplicate content is another technical SEO KPI to take very seriously. Internal duplicate content is seen as a low quality signal by Google and can lower your crawl ratio.
Google is also able to recognize near duplicate content – based on the Simhash method.
Near duplicates are often generated by thin content. In fact, the less content you have, the more likely you are to have very similar content on a same page.
Using Oncrawl, you can identify duplicate and near duplicate content. The following request helps you identify near duplicate and get an exhaustive picture of the problem:
Or you can access them directly with that graph from the “Duplicate Content” tab:
Or this one:
Here you can play with the number of clusters of duplicate pages and the near duplicate ratio.
This feature helps you strengthen your pages so your site drives visitors to the right pages, giving your domain a better chance at conversion and reduces pages competing for the same search result rankings.
How to get the most of your SEO metrics
To be able to measure the impact of your optimizations, you need to have the right tools and access the right technical SEO KPIs. Your on-page website data are not enough. You also need to access search engine behavior indicators to run a complete and comprehensive audit of your SEO performance:
- Run a complete crawl of your website
- Analyse your log files with a SEO log analyzer
- Combine your crawl and logs data to open the Google blackbox
- Connect your Google Analytics account for SEO, SMO and user’s behavior metrics
With these 4 steps, you will be able to easily spot the 5 technical SEO KPIs we previously listed. Are you ready to take action?
