I’m going to make a wild guess here: you’re probably doing SEO to improve your organic search traffic .
This is what most people start with SEO for .
By monitoring your organic traffic levels over time, you’ll get an excellent picture of how effective your SEO strategy actually is. With growth in organic search rankings directly tied to your SEO efforts, it’s one of the most accurate metrics you can obtain.
To track the change in organic search traffic, we will use everyone’s favorite tool— Google Analytics .
Once you are on the home dashboard, click the Reports button in the side panel, followed by Acquisition, and then click the Traffic Acquisition tab.
Now you will see a line graph that shows you where your traffic is coming from.
Your exact organic traffic levels aren’t important except for one thing— they’re trending upward .
If your organic traffic is improving, then your strategy is working. If your organic traffic is stagnating or declining, then you need to change your strategy.
4. Time spent on the page
In a post-Panda world, engagement fusion database metrics are becoming increasingly important . The time your visitors spend on your website is one of those metrics.
Here’s how it works: If a user spends a lot of time on your site, they probably like your content. This means your site is valuable and full of high-quality content.
A high time on page means you’re satisfying user intent . A searcher has a specific intent when they type a keyword into Google, and if they then land on your page and spend a significant amount of time there, then your page is fulfilling that intent.
To discover the total time your visitors spend on your website, you’ll want to dive into Google Analytics again .
On the left side of your dashboard, click Reports > Engagement > Overview
Likewise, a 30-second time on page would be great for a high-converting landing page, but terrible for a long, in-depth blog post.
When measuring your own average time on page, consider the page’s purpose. Is it purely informational? Or is the goal to encourage email signups? The purpose of the page will influence how much time users spend on it.
As a good benchmark for long-form written content, consider how long it takes to read the entire page. An average time on page roughly equal to this number would indicate that users are actually reading and enjoying your content.
5. Engagement rate and bounce rate
Google Analytics 4 introduced a new metric called “Engagement Rate.”
This metric is essentially the opposite of bounce rate and tells you how long your visitors spent on your site.
A high bounce rate means that users these are also masters-intermediaries land on your page and immediately click the back button.
While a high engagement rate means that your visitors stay on your page and interact with the website much longer.
Google’s goal is to make its users happy.
So, if people continually land on usa lists your website and leave as quickly as humanly possible, this won’t have a positive effect on your rankings, to say the least.
Bounce rate and engagement rate are two metrics you want to evaluate on a page-by-page basis.
This will show you if you have any weak content or pages that are destroying your overall bounce rate and engagement rate. If you want to learn how to set up these two metrics in your GA4, you can read more here .