9 Dos and Dont’s About SEM Metrics

In the world of Search Engine Marketing, there are an absolute tonne of different metrics that you might be familiar with. From domain authority to search visibility, it can be really hard to know what to listen to and base your strategies on. So, that’s why we’ve created this simple list. 

Here are five SEO metrics we feel you should be paying attention to and five that you can safely ignore.

SEM Metrics You Should Pay Attention To

Search Visibility

To start with, this is one of the most basic, yet crucial SEM metrics you should be tracking. Calculated based on the number of keywords you rank for, how high you rank for them and how much search volume they get, this is an easy way to see how successful your site is. This SEM metric is available through the tool, Search Metrics. The score you can get goes up indefinitely and lets you quickly and easily compare the performance of your site to that of your competitors.

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Trust Flow

Trust flow is one SEM metric that I find myself banging on about all the time. It’s something that people are still getting used to hearing, but is such a significant metric! Trust flow scores can be found using Majestic SEO’s backlink checking tool. This score is given based on the relevancy and quality of the website that is linking to you, based upon its own backlink profile.

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As such, when looking to build new links or find negative links, the trust flow score allows you to quickly make decisions about which sites to contact and/or keep said links from. Therefore, it truly is indispensable.

Average Time On Page

Google Analytics itself is guilty of giving information that you should really take with a pinch of salt (we’ll get into that later), but this is definitely an SEM metric that you want to pay attention to. This is because it takes the average across all pages and lets you see roughly how engaged someone is with your site.

However, if you have an e-commerce site that contains a lot of categories, it is recommended that you create a custom report. This should exclude these category pages so that you get a more accurate average time on page. This is because users typically funnel through category pages with speed, which would skew the average time data.

Users

Another one of Google Analytics’ wonderful SEM metrics, Users calculates the total amount of people who have come to your website within any specified time period. This is a great way to see how well your site performs in terms of traffic generation. This is especially true when you segment it by channel. Such as organic versus paid and when you use it alongside our next metric.

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New Visitors

When you use this SEM metric on its own or alongside Users, you can get a really good idea of how many new potential customers you are reaching compared to return customers. This is great because you can see business growth as well as brand retention within mere seconds!

SEM Metrics You Shouldn’t Pay Attention To

So, that’s five metrics that you should definitely look into and pay attention to. Now, as promised, here are five that you need to take with a pinch of salt.

Bounce Rate

This may come as a shock to some of you, but hear me out! Bounce rate is an important SEM metric, but you need to be careful and really think before basing a marketing strategy or SEO strategy primarily upon it. Why? Well, just imagine you were looking for the price of a pushchair to buy when you get paid.

You search for that specific pushchair in Google and find a website that sells it. After clicking on that site and finding the price written in big text, you leave the site, satisfied that you found what you needed. In fact, when you get your paycheck you are probably going to return to that site, or maybe the brick and mortar store and purchase the pushchair from there!

So, as you can see, there are many different reasons and aspects regarding bounce rate to be high. Therefore, you should not make any assumptions about it.

Domain Authority

This used to be the metric to look at when trying to find link building opportunities, replacing Pagerank. Now, however, it has been found that the score can be manipulated leading to false representation. Therefore, we prefer to use Trust Flow now as it is one of the most reliable scores to determine the strength and equity of a website.

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Pageviews

Whilst Pageviews can give you an idea of engagement levels, it shouldn’t be the central point to rate a website on. In fact, when you’re link building, you may even see people boasting about how many “views” their website gets. The issue here is that “views” does not mean users.

Pageviews specifically refer to how many times a page is viewed, not even taking into account if the viewer has returned to the page after 5 minutes of inactivity. Therefore, one user could create 10,000 pageviews entirely by themselves. With that in mind, it is easy to see how this metric can lead to false ideas of performance for a website very quickly!

Sessions

Whilst this SEM metric is much better than Page Views, it still suffers the same issue. A session refers to a specific time that a user is on the website. It will include all page views within that period of time, but when a user leaves the website and then returns shortly after, it may count as a new session.

Have you ever seen the message “your session has timed out”? This is because a cookie was put onto your computer or mobile device. After a set period of time, this will time out, meaning that you need to reload the page. This will also time out even if you have left the site. Therefore, once that has happened and you reload or revisit the site, you will count as a new session once again. So, whilst you definitely shouldn’t ignore sessions, they are not always the most reliable metric.

sessions

Have you ever seen the message “your session has timed out”? This is because a cookie was put onto your computer or mobile device. After a set period of time, this will time out, meaning that you need to reload the page. This will also time out even if you have left the site. Therefore, once that has happened and you reload or revisit the site, you will count as a new session once again. So, whilst you definitely shouldn’t ignore sessions, you should take it with a pinch of salt.

Organic Impressions

Whilst Impressions can be really important in a brand building Google Ads campaign, in Organic tracking, it really isn’t worth much. That’s why, when looking through Search Console, you should take this point into account. To begin with, Google isn’t going to tell you all of the information about what searches you get seen for. We already know this from the whole “Not Provided” debacle. So, why would you trust that the Organic Impressions data shown in Search Console to be correct?

In a nutshell, it gives you a very brief, segmented overview of a small fragment of the keywords you rank and appear for. The information that this metric contains can be used as a basis to expand upon for keyword research, but shouldn’t be used as a measurement of success.

Do You Need More Guidance With Tracking Metrics?

And there you have it; five metrics to pay attention to and five to really be wary of. I hope this helps you when it comes to creating Digital Marketing strategies! 

Do you need more guidance on how and what metrics you should track for your SEM strategy? Well, our SEM experts at Brave Agency can help you with this. Simply contact us here or call us today on 0845 5443626.

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