Why you should never look at these SEO Metrics: Do This Instead!

The truth is that too many businesses have been focused on a ton of SEO metrics that look really nice but aren't driving results at all. Today, we weed through the noise and show you exactly which metrics are strictly vanity versus real drivers to success on your website. Knowing where to focus will help optimize your SEO strategy and drive meaningful improvements.

Vanity SEO Metrics You Can Safely Ignore

1. Domain Rating (DR) & Authority Score:

Why You Shouldn't Worry:

These are just made-up metrics by tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. They don't impact your rankings in Google. They may be impressive to some, but possessing high DR has never guaranteed one single visitor or more important, one single sale. A low DR doesn't stop you from having success. A lot of sites with high DRs get nowhere when it comes to traffic levels. Instead, focus on real performance metrics—conversions and engagement.

2. Traffic Value:

Why You Shouldn't Care:

Traffic value estimates how much your organic traffic would be worth if you had to pay for each of those keywords via pay-per-click. But all of that doesn't count for much when your traffic's not converting to customers or leads. Optimizing for trip value is likely to result in targeting the wrong kinds of keywords — the kind that will drive lots of visitors who have no interest in what you're selling.

3. Total Traffic: Why You Shouldn't Care

Traffic is great to have, but if it's not targeted, it doesn't really benefit a business. For example, a small business website that gets thousands of hits from around the world, but if those hits are the nature of its business, most probably, they're worthless. The point here is that traffic should be brought in on pages that will lead a visitor to become a client.

4. Keyword Rankings:

Why You Shouldn't Care:

Keyword rankings are becoming less and less accurate within all the time simply because of the personalized search results. Your ranking position could be highly variable from one individual to the next based on their own search history. Plus, rankings alone do not make conversions happen. A high rank with no clicks or conversions does not even mean anything to you; doesn't even mean anything to the bosses. So instead, focus on the user intent and satisfaction on that intent, and in return, that will give you better engagement and better conversions.

5. Total Backlinks:

Why You Shouldn't Care:

Quality of backlinks, not quantity. Unfocused buying or gathering of backlinks can sometimes injure your site because these are usually links from low-quality or irrelevant sites. The new Google, however, will reward those backlinks that are both relevant to and quality from within an industry.

6. Social Media Impressions & Audience Size

Why You Shouldn't Care: 

Large social media followings and large impression counts are just about the worst possible definition of success. One can buy followers, and impressions could concentrate on people who won't ever buy from you. It's much more useful to track metrics such as content shares and conversions that result from social media, which give insight into whether your audience is truly engaging and interested in your brand.

The SEO Metrics That Matter

1. Focus on Relevant Keywords:

Keywords ranking using PERMAR AI
Keywords ranking using PERMAR AI

Why You Care:

Ranking for the right keywords brings targeted visitors to your website. This doubles your probabilities for conversion and hence strengthens your authority in that particular niche. Google rewards sites with valuable content relevant to users' search queries.

Tips to Conduct Keyword Optimization Effectively:

  • Do your research: Find keywords that people do actually look for, but which are not as competitive, using tools such as the Google Keyword Planner, Permar AI, or Ahrefs. It will also help to see what your competition is using.
  • Create Good Content: Make sure that whatever you write is both informative and engaging to the audience. Do not stuff keywords; use them naturally. Keyword stuffing will just make the content seem very awkward, which will hurt your overall SEO campaign.
  • Optimize Key Areas: Make sure to use keywords in important spots like page titles, meta descriptions, and headers. This helps search engines understand what your site is about and improves your ranking.
  • Monitor Performance: Regularly check how your keywords are doing and tweak your strategy as needed. Staying current with trends will keep your SEO efforts effective and relevant.

2. Improve Your Click-Through Rate (CTR):

Click-Through Rate (CTR) cycle
Click-Through Rate (CTR) cycle

Why This Is Important:

A high CTR tells Google the content is relevant and engaging, which can boost your rankings. Bad CTR may be a signal of poor meta titles and descriptions. CTR improvements help to bring in more traffic and higher conversions.

  • High click-through rates lead to high Quality Scores.
  • High Quality Scores allow you to improve or maintain ad position for lower costs.

3. Improve Core Web Vitals:

Core Web Vitals overview
Core Web Vitals overview

Core Web Vitals refer to the measurements of user experience around loading speed and visual stability. Google uses the metrics to rank pages, because the gist lies in how users experience your page. Therefore, a good score on Core Web Vitals not only gives a push to the ranking but also helps keep users satisfied and retained.

Range of Core Web Vitals
Range of Core Web Vitals

How to Improve Core Web Vitals

  • Optimize your images: High resolution pictures can decrease the load time of your website, ultimately affecting your page speed score. Optimize your images by compressing them, resizing them to proper web dimensions, and using modern formats like WebP.
  • Enable browser caching: Browser caching stores parts of your site in a user‘s browser, so they don’t need to load everything from scratch each time they visit. Therefore, caching can enhance your page load speed significantly.
  • Minimize CSS and JavaScript. Too much of it can begin to bog down the site. Be sure to minify it using the tools or plugins for such. Moreover, think about "lazy loading" your JavaScript for maximum responsiveness.
  • Address layout shifts: To tackle visual stability issues, avoid adding content above existing content on the page unless it's in response to a user action. Also, specify dimensions for images and videos to prevent layout shifts.
  • Sort issues by label: Start with anything labeled “Poor.” Finally, prioritize your work based on the large-scale issues affecting the most significant number of critical URLs. Next, there are issues with the “Needs Improvement” designation.

4. Make Sure All Pages Are Indexed

Google Page Index
Google Page Index

Why You Should Care:

Indexed pages are those that Google deems good enough to appear in the search results. In other words, if your money pages aren't indexed, they won't appear in the search results, no matter how good they might be. Making sure all your important pages are crawled and indexed means you can give people the full representation of your site in the search results and a better chance of one day finding it back.

According to Google:

A page is indexed by Google if it has been visited by the Google crawler, analyzed for content and meaning, and stored in the Google index. Indexed pages can be shown in Google Search results.

5. Increase Your Crawl Rate:

Crawler
Crawler

Why You Care:

A higher crawl rate means Google is frequently checking your website for updates, then it becomes a walk in the park for your new content to get indexed and ranked quickly. The best practice to improve the crawl rate is to publish resources at the recommended rate of new content frequently, interlinking the content to maintain the freshness of the site and giving Google signals that new resources have been updated on the site.

Factors Determining Crawl Rate:

  • Website’s Response: The crawlers always want to crawl fast sites. A slow or problematic site can drastically lower the rate and frequency of crawls. This will, other than solely improving response time for the sake of crawl budget, create a better user experience—important for keeping visitors and driving website performance in general. 
  • Updating Website: Googlebot loves to crawl fresh content. It gets attracted to a site with frequently changed content. If you are going to update it frequently, that will tell Google you have an active and relevant site. For example, news sites are crawled frequently since they have new content added to them continuously. By continually adding or editing content, you will be encouraging crawls to occur more frequently, and you will be able to dynamically appear in search results.
  • Domain Authority: Google puts first high-domain authority sites. The websites that have big and matured authority are crawled and indexed often. Building your domain authority with consistently high quality content and user engagement signals to Google that you are hosting a quality site.
  • Backlinks: Links are the paths that bots follow to reach from one website to another. By creating five backlinks, you have added five more opportunities for crawlers to visit your site.Also, giving links to other websites is like giving your vote to them. It will indicate to Google that it is a trusted website in its niche, making it an excellent choice to be crawled. 
  • Sections Of The Website: Crawl efficiency is measured on the host level by Google. Therefore, if one part of your site is performing badly, it's going to hurt other areas—like, say, your blog. Making sure all parts of your site are as optimized and as responsive as one another supports good crawl performance overall.

Conclusion: Focus on Metrics That Drive Results

What really matters are metrics such as relevant keywords, CTR, and Core Web Vitals that impact your website's performance. These metrics are going to help you scale your business and achieve lasting success with SEO. Now, with the help of Permar AI, you could get back to what truly matters about your strategy and start pushing the real business results you need.

Matthias Strafinger

Author
Founder of Permar AI
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