For almost 30 years, websites and online entities have seen search engines as one of the crucial pillars of visibility. While this has not inherently changed, the nature of what constitutes search engine optimization has continued to morph. Where it was easy to use a few tricks to gain quick, substantial notoriety in the past, it is much more difficult today due to competition, revisions to search engine algorithms, and more.

As such, SEO is a very difficult art to mater. Yet those who are just starting or who need a bit of a boost to their existing efforts need not look very far for inspiration. To help those brands, blogs and businesses, we’ll take a gander today at what simple metrics for link building and tactics can help build the foundation for an improved SEO strategy.

Keyword Rankings

Easily one of the top three metrics to monitor while conducting SEO affairs, keyword rankings require focus and dedication in order to maximize performance. There are a wide variety of keywords that your brand may be using: some may be directly relevant to your brand (such as brand keywords or exact match configurations), while others may be tangential in nature.

Generally, you want to be pinging search engines in the top position for keywords that are most closely related to your brand and its niche, while ranking well in other, less-relevant keywords and SERPs as well.

Backlinks

Building a powerhouse of referral traffic is vital in maintaining long-term passive attention, but search engines also love to see websites with a diverse array of backlinks. In order to be prominent in search results, earning links from other domains is imperative: there is a direct correlation between the number of backlinks a website has and its general rankings in select SERPs.

Ultimately, you’ll find a number of tools available that can help you keep track of how many links you have amassed and from where. These referring domains are a cornerstone of proper SEO technique and improvement.

Traffic Quality

From where is your traffic coming and what inherent value does it provide? For those seeking to bolster their organic visibility in search, the quality of your traffic can matter immensely. Tracking this dynamic can be done via a wide variety of metrics (some of which search engines directly assess to determine page quality).

Factors such as time on page and bounce rates can tell you a lot about the overall quality of your traffic. If most people are simply landing and exiting, then that is a not a good sign for the quality of traffic you’re receiving (and will likely not provide much SEO benefit).

Organic Interactions

What are people doing once they arrive at your website? Hopefully, they are pinging search engines with a variety of actions, conversions and behaviors that indicate interest and relevance. This could be reading or browsing multiple pages, signing up for an account, subscribing to a service or any other similar action.

The more actions visitors take while on your website, the more beneficial this can be for SEO. Monitoring these behaviors via services such as Google Analytics (as well as other analytics programs for specific services, such as email subscriptions) is straightforward if not a bit disjointed.

These simple metrics may not seem like a huge deal, but search engines like to boost website visibility for domains that perform well in these categories. Now that you know, you can begin focusing on these areas and monitoring your progress effectively.