Everything You Need to Know About Collecting SEO Data By analyzing SEO data, you can understand your mistakes, develop new ideas and strategies and adjust existing goals.

SEO data grants you access to a variety of information. Leads, rankings, engagement metrics — the insights are all there and they are so easy to access. By analyzing SEO data, you can understand your mistakes, develop new ideas and strategies and adjust existing goals.

However, it's also true that sometimes SEO apps can give you almost too much information for you to understand at once. The key to solving this issue is to focus primarily on the most essential and crucial data they offer. Of course, the remaining information is also worth analyzing. However, you should always focus on the following metrics no matter the size of your business. They will give you the most critical information about the current state of your project.

Related: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Giants in SEO

New referring domains

Did you know that backlinks from new, trusted domains can arguably be more helpful than those from the domains previously linking to your content? This is because Google believes that the more your backlinks originate from unrelated, independent sources, the more trustworthy you seem.

On the other hand, if your backlinks constantly originate from one or two domains, that makes your webpage look suspicious. It's essential to try and acquire as many referring domains as possible and a good SEO app tool will always allow you to check for any new domains linking to your page.

Domain rating

Domain ratings are important because it's a general score of how "strong" or "trusted" your website is. In short, a higher domain rating also means that your webpage will score a better spot in the Google search results. That, in turn, means it will be visible to more potential customers, generate more clicks and appear more secure to any potential partners you might team up with.

However, keep in mind that the domain rating is not Google's official tool. As such, there might be minor discrepancies. For example, a domain rated "79" might appear slightly higher in the Google search result than a domain rated "80".

Optimization scores

Each high-quality SEO information app will offer you a handful of optimization scores. And each of those scores is based on a different factor (i.e. the keyword density, internal and external linkings, canonical URLs or even page titles will all be rated separately.) This ensures that you are well aware of what works right and what aspects of your page need changing to focus on just that.

The optimization scores work much like the domain rating; the higher a given score is, the better. You should always work to achieve high optimization scores — this is key to achieving the success of any domain.

Text readability metric

This is yet another helpful metric. No matter what type of website you are running, you should always make sure that the content you produce is easy to read and understand, free of any spelling or grammar errors and meets the SEO requirements.

To achieve that, try to use shorter sentences, paragraphs and sections. Pick the right keywords with the help of an SEO app and place them in the text so that they fit in with the rest of the content. Luckily, various apps and tools help you with that, so achieving a high text readability score should not be too hard.

Impressions rate

An impression is made each time a webpage appears in a Google search result. Let's say you searched for the query "Best Street Food in New York", and in the search results you see, among others, the official website of "Brooklyn Burger" — you have generated an impression for that website.

The impressions rate is, of course, a useful metric, but keep in mind that when analyzing this result, you should always pair it up with the CTR.

The CTR

The CTR, or the click-through conversion rate, informs you how many of your webpage's impressions turned into clicks. You will most likely notice, at least at the beginning of your journey, that the click-through conversion rate of your domain is much lower than the impressions rate.

For example, your webpage might generate a total of 1,000 impressions, but only 10 of those impressions might turn into clicks. The CTR is useful for monitoring the general level of interest your website is generating. The higher the CTR, the higher the interest in your services, and the higher your website places in the SERPs.

Related: How to Increase Your Organic Click-Through Rates

Organic ratings

There are three types of organic ratings: organic visibility, organic traffic and organic conversion. They all complement each other.

The first one measures your sitewide visibility in the Google search engine, and it will rank you for all tracked keywords and give a specific score.

The second statistic tells you about the amount of traffic your webpage is generating. Of course, with no traffic, there is no way to operate a functioning website.

Finally, the third metric will tell you the quality of the traffic (i.e. whether you are gathering the right customers, targeting the right people, etc.) It measures the amount of "conversions" (signups, subscriptions, leads or sales) versus the amount of generated traffic.

If the amount of generated traffic is pretty high but the number of conversions is low, you probably aren't targeting a suitable user base.

Number of indexed pages

Before any pages hosted on your domain appear in the Google search results, they must be indexed first. Otherwise, they will simply not generate any traffic, at least not from the Google search engine, as they just will not show up in the search results.

Just a warning: If the indexation process reveals any sort of duplicated, outdated or otherwise irrelevant pages, or if a page lacks content or the content is "thin" (contains less than 300 words), all that might hurt your search ranking position.

Always keep your webpage clean and up-to-date. You can do this by merging weak web pages, deleting outdated and irrelevant content or redirecting the links.

Pages per visit

The pages per visit metric is yet another helpful metric when analyzing conversion. This one informs you how many pages a visitor visits when browsing through your website. Of course, the more, the better.

If an average person only visits your landing page and then leaves immediately, it's pretty safe to say that for some reason, your website just doesn't catch on with people. To improve this metric, you can ensure that your website is easy to navigate and intuitive. Add various types of engaging content or simply help the visitors navigate properly by adding many internal links.

Crawl errors

Contrary to the metrics mentioned above, you do not want your SEO app to indicate any potential crawl error on your domain. A crawl error occurs when the Google search engine tries to connect with a given page on your website but ultimately can't.

This doesn't mean that your website as a whole is unreachable — crawl errors can, for example, occur when a user is finished reading an article on your blog and wants to proceed to the next entry. Sadly, if there is a crawl error on any page, that page can't be indexed and won't receive any traffic until the problem is fixed.

In the case that many crawl errors occur on your webpage, Google's algorithms may even demote its place in the SERPs.

Related: How to Establish a Viable Long-Term SEO Strategy

Conclusion

With just a handful of SEO tools readily available today, tracking all of the metrics mentioned above is easier than ever. Considering just how important it is to monitor those, your actions can make or break your SEO game. That said, make sure to stay on top of your metrics and optimize accordingly if your goal is to beat your competition.