Search engine optimization services are typically a significant portion of a company’s digital marketing budget, as they understand the importance and work required for professional results. However, they are often delivered in a report with results they simply don’t understand. Search Engine Optimization is a very technical process and involves certain metrics that people without a computer science or significant digital background may not comprehend.

In this article, we’ll dive into some of the most important metrics we share in our SEO reporting including Search Visibility and other important easy to understand metrics. Search Visibility is one of the primary measures of SEO success and this key figure represents how visible your site is on search engines. It helps measure the overall ranking process and compares your visibility with that of your competitors as well. It can also be useful when trying to assess performance on different search engines, keyword groups or locations. This number is represented with a percentage that is relative to the number of clicks estimated to be received based on your rankings position, across all keywords. To be competitive, Moz suggests visibility of at least 35%. Don’t panic if you see a low number initially, it’s not uncommon for sites that are new or that have never done SEO to have a value in the single digits when just starting out.

Domain Authority is another important metric. Similar to Search Visibility, Domain Authority predicts a domain’s ranking potential based on certain components of the link, such as age, popularity, and size of website. Domain Authority uses a 0-100 logarithmic scale, a high domain authority means your complete website and all of its pages have the potential to rank well. Examples of websites that have very high DA range from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia. Data on an ideal DA is limited because of the ever-changing nature of the search, but some gurus suggest to aim for at least a value of 30 for small to medium traffic websites.

Another critical dimension of SEO is external linking. External linking in some studies has been shown to be the #1 predictor of search performance. Most SEO management tools show a count of external links per website so the number links can be monitored along with SEO improvements. There are a lot of great tools out there like Audience Bloom that help businesses with relevant linking on their sites. You should be careful of “spammy” link providers in the industry, with SEO you get what you pay for. Google is getting better and better at detecting spam, and links that aren’t trustworthy can end up harming SEO efforts.

There are various other analytics to consider when measuring the success of SEO efforts that can be gathered from Google Analytics and other tools that we didn’t mention, such as SEMrush. When reporting on SEO it is important to remember that the numbers themselves are just one piece of the equation, it is how the numbers relate and change over time that really matters to see a true ROI on your SEO investment.

Interested in SEO? Here at Red Shark Digital we are masters at SEO and making effective data-driven decisions to enhance the online presence of our clients. Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about what we can  do for you and your SEO efforts.