Local SEO Metrics

Local SEO Metrics to Track in 2024

The world of SEO is dynamic and has been experiencing constant changes over the years. With the dawn of 2024, SEO-sphere has already gone a few small and big changes including the trend-breaking Mobile First Indexing update.

With each new change, it becomes crucial for the webmasters to measure their SEO metrics regularly to know the results of the work they’ve been doing to keep in tandem with these changes. Tracking the SEO metrics is the only way to ensure that you are making the efforts in the right direction.

In this context, here we’ve enumerated the top SEO metrics that you should track in 2024 to ensure you are making the efforts in the right direction:

1. Keyword Rankings

In 2017, Google accounted for nearly 79% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 7.27%, and Yahoo at 5.06%.

When it comes to SEO or digital marketing, ignoring this metric can cost you a lot.

On the other hand, analyzing this metric helps you know the changes in your keyword rankings and the measures you need to make to achieve the same.

Keyword ranking is an opportunity to determine whether your website is capable enough at getting ranked on Google and attract organic traffic. You can track this metric using both free and paid tools, which help get daily, weekly, and monthly reports. In addition, these tools help you view accurate rankings for all major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Many of these tools come packed with advanced features that help you filter your data and perform competitive analysis to enhance your brand visibility.

2. Bounce Rate

2. Bounce Rate

Web pages that load in 2.4 seconds have a bounce rate of nearly 12.8%, whereas the pages that load in 3.3 seconds experiences a bounce rate of 20%.

“Total number of visitors navigating away from the website after viewing only one page.”

One of the most underrated metrics of any SEO campaign is the website’s bounce rate. This is an important consideration as it explains the entire journey of your visitors – which links they click, path they take on landing a page, average stay time of the visitors, etc. In short, the bounce rate helps you understand your visitors’ behavior on your website.

You have just 10 seconds to leave an impression to the user, after this they will leave.

To ensure minimal bounce rate, you must add useful and accurate information relevant to the most searched keyword in your niche. This is because if a visitor does not get what he/she is looking for on your website, they will leave right away. Also, ensure a user-friendly website design (layout) that is easily navigable for the visitor.

3. Indexed Pages

If you are among those who believe that submitting a page for indexing ensures that it will automatically get indexed, it’s time for you to open your eyes! Google considers a submitted page as a suggestion. Indexing it is an entirely different process.

Hence, in order to ensure that your pages are indexed correctly, follow these practices:

  • Submit the Sitemap via Google Search Console
  • Remove Robot.txt to ensure your most important pages are not blocked.

Tracking your indexed pages is critical because unindexed pages is an indication that you could be missing out on very big opportunities.

4. Site Traffic by Devices

79% of total keywords and 47% of keywords in positions 1- 20 rank differently in search on mobile and desktop SERPs.

With the launch of the Mobilegeddon update and Mobile-First index, it became clear that Google considers sites that are mobile responsive. While having to design a mobile-friendly is important to keep your site away from Google penalties, it also affects the conversion rates heavily.

To check the performance of your website on mobile devices, follow these steps:

  • Go to Google Analytics.
  • Click on “overview” section.
  • Click on “Audience -> Mobile -> Overview”

Here, you’ll get a quick information like bounce rate, time on-page, etc. for each type of devices. Having an anomaly in the data means you need to re-work on your website design and optimize it for the mobile platforms.

5. Conversion Rates

For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them.

good conversion rate that leads to increased sales is the ultimate goal of every website. Tracking and evaluating the conversion rates helps to know the primary source of conversions – whether it is due to organic traffic or from the referrals from social networks.

When it comes to measuring this metric, you must consider the first time purchase of a customer as well as their repeat purchases. This will help you calculate the customer’s lifetime value (LTV). Higher conversion rates indicate better performance of a website in terms of accomplishing business goals.

6. Average page load time

According to the research, no one likes a website that takes longer loading time. Moreover, such kinds of websites have higher bounce rates. Increased bounce rates can hurt your website badly. It is where the concept of average load time comes in. The average load time is the speed that users experience while opening your website. Page speed is the most crucial part of the local SEO report. By prioritizing website average speed, you can ensure if your visitors are getting a better user experience. 

7. Organic Conversions

Conversions from organic traffic can dictate a lot about the health of your website including the content. Organic means that comes without any campaign or, and traffic depends on the website, services, and appealing content. With organic traffic, you get to know about the demand for your product or services. If your website experiences higher organic traffic but lower conversion rates, it means your content is not attractive. 

In such cases, you need to monitor a few changes and adjust according to them. When you experience low organic traffic along with fewer conversions, there might be two cases for that. The first may be the less demand for your product or services, and the second may be the poor optimisation.  

You can track organic conversions by setting up a fixed goal in Google Analytics like:

Email signups

phone calls

Form submissions 

page speed 

8. Customer Reviews

Reviews help a lot in ranking your local business and website. It can help you to know what users think about your services and products. Google has a different algorithm for organic and local SEO. However, customer reviews benefit everywhere, if these are negative it can hurt your rankings. So, paying attention to Google local algorithms is necessary. 

Today everyone believes in word of mouth, online reviews, and potential customers will not buy anything until and unless they check the reviews. Reviews tell if a person is going to come back to take your services or not. Getting five stars and positive reviews on your local business can enhance your SEO. The more stars and reviews you get, the more visitors and potential customers will trust you. See the power of reviews. 

9. Authority DA/TF

Creating backlinks and tracking their number is just a part of local SEO metrics, but it is not everything. There is a need to check the authority of the backlinks, as the quality backlinks will make your site more authoritative. 

You might be aware of the word “Domain Authority” in SEO. The domain authority is scaled between 0-100, and the higher number means your domain is trustworthy. You can track authority metrics via some tools. There is the advice not to overuse this metric. 

10. Geographically targeted keywords and clicks.

When you are working to boost your local SEO, try to use local keywords and check the number of clicks on them. It helps you to analyse and track how the customers are getting the content. The more clicks will tell you how many users are interested in it. Furthermore, the aim of geo-targeted keywords is that it helps you to reach the customers of your area that might be interested in your products and services. 

11. New Sessions

You must take care of it when a new user has eyes on your product or services, as it will benefit your local business. Considering it as your key performance indicator is essential. New users and session creation dictate how well you are reaching new audiences.  Also reaching a greater audience means you are slowly moving towards brand awareness. New sessions will portray how strong is your SEO and how early you might achieve your goals.

12. Organic Traffic (location-based)

Organic traffic can be broken down further into local searches, and this is a useful metric. It helps you to measure the location-based organic traffic whether the district, street, etc. If you are performing local SEO, it means the result should be the audience of a particular area interested in your services or products. 

It is essential to determine from where you get traffic. Also, you must check whether you are reaching your target audience or not. Let’s say you have your local business store in Chandigarh, you will want to attract the attention of the local audience.

13. Phone Clicks or mobile traffic

Today around 60% of the population uses mobile phones to operate websites. Moreover, as per the algorithm, it is important to have a website that is mobile-friendly. Keeping a track of the traffic that you can get from mobile indicates  the following things:

  1. If you are not getting a good amount of traffic via Mobile phone, it indicates issues with mobile-friendliness.
  2. Furthermore, with this metric, you can think of investing money in application development (like separate applications for mobile users). So, always track both metrics mobile rankings and mobile traffic.

14. Time spent on the web page

We stay a while and read the content, scroll the page, but only when we like it. Don’t we? The same happens with websites too, if your website is highly engaging and takes load time, visitors will be more than happy to stay. Tracking this metric helps you to determine the usefulness of your content.  You must keep in mind that only those users care to stay who find the content worthy and catchy. 

15. URL views

What is the fun of working hard on improving the SEO of your website when no one is even seeing that. Yes, you heard it right. Are visitors even noticing your website or the URL. This metric is directly related to your organic keyword and its quality. If you are not getting quality views, it means you need to re-work on the content and optimize your CTR.

The Final Say

Monitoring and tracking these important SEO Metrics, and addressing the issues constantly will give you improved stats. It doesn’t finish here, there are still a lot of factors that you need to analyse. Use such keywords that users search out frequently. While working on your website’s SEO, try to figure out the keywords that users can search more often. There is no point in using such keywords that have less search volume. You should target top keywords in your web pages.

It requires expertise to track all the metrics, and only a best SEO agency can perform all these activities. 

Still wondering?? Contact SEO Discovery’s Local SEO consultant for assistance today! 

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