Important SEO Metrics to Track and Why Traffic isn’t on the List

When you’re working on SEO, you should check metrics to see what’s working and what’s not working. You might be surprised to find out that traffic isn’t at the top of my list of SEO metrics to track. Honestly, traffic doesn’t really matter a lot when it comes to determining the success of your SEO program.

Why isn’t traffic one of the important SEO metrics you need to track?

Yes, traffic is often impacted by the SEO work that you do on your website. If you’re doing SEO and ranking higher, there’s a good chance your website traffic will be up. At first glance, it seems like that would always be good news, right? I did SEO, my website traffic went up, and I must be doing something right.

However, website traffic only tells part of the story. There are other metrics that help you understand what’s going on better and at a deeper level.

I recommend my students track their website traffic once a month so they can see if it’s going up or down, but traffic alone isn’t that important.

What’s more important than website traffic?

Rather than focusing on how many people are finding your website, I want you to look at how people are interacting with your website. You want to look to see which pages are getting traffic, how many leads are being generated, and how much money you’re making.

The amount of time someone spends on your site, the number of pages of content they consume, and how they interact with your site impact your SEO performance and can impact your Google rankings. Google looks to see how users interact with a website. If a lot of people come to your site and then leave quickly (bounce), then you’re not going to be viewed as a good answer for that question or a good response to that keyword search, and Google will be less likely to show your site to people who search for similar terms in the future.

From a business perspective, it’s more important to generate leads and sales than just to get traffic to your site. You could have a site with a ton of traffic and no sales, and unless you were running your site only on ads, you’d go broke.

Which metrics should you track for SEO?

I think it’s OK to look at traffic on a monthly basis – take a look at the overall traffic numbers, is SEO (organic) traffic up or down? But don’t stop there. I want you to look at the specific pages in your sales funnel that lead to sales. How are those pages doing? Where is your SEO traffic going? Which pages get organic traffic?

If you’ve set up conversion goals in your analytics software, I want you to look at your opt-ins. How many new leads did you get this month from organic traffic? If you have conversion tracking or revenue goals set up in your analytics, then how many sales did you make from SEO this month?

Why do leads and sales matter more than traffic?

If you’re trying to grow your business, do you care if 500 people come to your website via SEO because you have a podcast episode with a popular guest if those 500 people don’t sign up for your lead magnets or buy your products? If they only come to read about the person who was on your podcast and leave, they haven’t helped to grow your business.

I had a client who had this exact situation on her website a few years ago. She was initially really concerned about her SEO traffic dropping but I was able to help her see that it didn’t matter because it was traffic that was all going to a podcast episode page and didn’t lead into her sales funnel.

What if your traffic dropped but your revenue went up? Would you care?

I have a student whose website traffic is down by 35% since we started working together. Some people might feel like the SEO was broken or hadn’t worked. And, if all you care about is the total amount of SEO traffic, it does look like the situation is bad. However, what we found was that total SEO traffic was down by 35% but revenue was up by 52% (over $150,000) in the same timeframe. How is this even possible? We are getting more of the right people to the website now and fewer of the wrong people. She does not care that her website traffic is down. It makes no difference to her. The traffic for the pages that matter to her is up significantly.

Final Thoughts on why traffic isn’t an important SEO metric to track.

I’m not saying don’t look at your website traffic, I’m saying it’s not that important in the overall picture. What’s more important is how the people who find your site via search interact with your site. Look to see if you’re generating leads and sales; they matter a lot more than just traffic.

If you have a breakdown between the two and are getting traffic but not seeing leads and sales coming from it, there’s an issue with your content strategy, and you need help adjusting it. I don’t want you to waste time trying to do SEO and end up with the wrong people on your site. Join me in a group program or work 1:1 with me, and I’ll help you analyze what’s happening, fix it, and start making more money the same way I have for other students.