How to Track and Measure Your Ecommerce SEO Results

Intro

Optimizing your ecommerce SEO can be an exacting process. There are a number of steps involving a range of metrics and tools to follow.

The process is often tailored to each business and website. Your goals, long- and short-term matter; they will inform which metrics you use to track performance and the tools you use to measure it. While your long-term goal may be to increase organic revenue, in the short-term, that will break down to boosting traffic, domain authority, or conversions, depending on where you’re falling short.

Here’s a quick primer on how you can go about optimizing SEO for your ecommerce site.

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Important SEO KPIs to Monitor

There are a range of KPIs potentially available to you as an online seller. Tracking the right ones can mean the difference between success and failure.

1. Organic Traffic

This is the traffic you receive from search engines. It’s a measurement of how many people click on your website’s link when they see it in search results. You can easily access organic traffic metrics in Google Analytics and some in Google Search Console. Here are some key terms to know when scanning organic traffic metrics:

• Sessions: The number of people who’ve visited your site
• Unique visits: The number of unique visitors to your site. If the same user has visited your site multiple times in a month, it’s still counted as just one unique visit
• Traffic sources: The source of your website traffic, whether that’s search engines, social media, or directly via the URL.

Implementing effective strategies for tracking your website visitors is crucial to understanding and optimizing your SEO outcomes.

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a measure of single-page sessions divided by all page sessions for your website. If a user visits your site and leaves without taking any other actions on the page, they are said to have bounced. It usually indicates that your site or products didn’t appeal to the user and they left without engaging.

An optimal ecommerce bounce rate can be anywhere between 25-45% with the average in 2022 being 43%. A high bounce rate is obviously bad for business, since it can indicate your visitors aren’t converting. It can also contribute to poor search rankings since Google interprets it as a poor user experience on your website.

3. On-Page Engagement

On-page engagement metrics reveal the level and quality of interaction for users on your site.

• Scroll depth: It measures how far a user scrolls down each web page. If users are leaving without scrolling too far, it might indicate that the page isn’t tailored to your target audience well enough.
• Average Engagement Time per Session: This is the amount of time a user spends analyzing your web page. Low dwell time means the page doesn’t align with the user’s needs. If the dwell time is high and conversions are low, it means the products aren’t a good fit for the users.
• Click-through rate: This is the number of people who are clicking on a call-to-action on a web page. In the case of ecommerce, this is typically the Buy Now button.

4. Conversion Rate

This is particularly important in the context of any business. It’s the number of people who have “converted” or bought into your products. Conversion rate is a good barometer of on-page SEO success.

Google Analytics offers you something called Assisted Conversions, which lets you attribute conversions to organic traffic. This gives you a better idea of how effective your SEO efforts have proven in generating sales.

5. Keyword Rankings

Keyword ranking is the order in which your website appears in search results for specific keywords. You’ll want to track both the keywords you’re currently ranking for and your target keywords where you’d like to rank higher.

It’s a good idea to track both branded and non-branded keywords. It’ll give you a sense of whether you’re ranking largely for people searching for your brand's products or also when they’re searching for the category of products you sell.

6. Domain Authority

Your website authority is a measure of how relevant your website is for a specific subject area, industry, or keyword. It’s usually measured on a scale of 0 to 100. Originally developed by Moz, you now have a few different options to measure it, including Ahrefs’ website authority checker.

SEO Tools to Measure Progress on Your Metrics

There are a host of SEO tracking tools out there that have distinct and overlapping benefits. Some of the best ones are free, while a few are paid — and worth the money. If you’re operating on a limited budget, consider partnering with a proven digital marketing agency to handle your ecommerce SEO. They’re likely to have access to all the necessary tools, plus the expertise to deploy them correctly.

1. Google Analytics

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Google Analytics is as close to a comprehensive website analytics tool as is currently available on the market. Some 38 million websites use it. It’s completely free with a Google Account (unless you have more than 10 million sessions per month per property).

You can use it to measure everything from site visitors, page views, bounce rates, conversion rates, dwell time, and more. Businesses rely on it to improve SEO, understand customer behavior on their site, run and track marketing campaigns, and develop new products and services.

2. Google Search Console

This is a web service by Google that allows website owners to check whether their sites are fully indexed and available to list in search results. It also offers several other extremely useful features, including measuring traffic, checking the kind of queries you’re ranking for, fixing SEO issues, and more.

3. Bing Webmaster Tools

This is Bing’s version of the Google Search Console, with some added features for improved website analytics tracking for Bing users. It gives you access to a range of fee reports, tools, and resources to improve your website’s performance on Bing.

4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a paid platform that helps you with site auditing, keyword research, link analysis, SERP analysis, and more. It has a few free tools on offer as well, including a keyword generator, backlink checker, website traffic checker, keyword difficulty checker, and more.

5. Screaming Frog

This is one of the best SEO audit tools out there, letting you crawl small and large websites to help you improve on-site SEO by identifying and resolving common issues. It lets you download and crawl 500 URLs for free. A paid version is also available that enables you to download and crawl as many URLs as you’d like.

6. Semrush

Semrush offers you an excellent selection of SEO tools to help with traffic analytics, industry overview, organic performance research, keyword research, backlink research, site audits, and more. It has three different pricing tiers, starting at $129.95 per month.

7. Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is an excellent tool to help you audit your website’s content, such as blog posts and articles. It gives you comprehensive reports that let you analyze, research, write, and optimize your content for SEO in minutes. It’s a paid tool as well, starting at $139 per month.

Conclusion

While the principles of SEO implementation remain the same, the strategies, by definition, have to be tailored to each business scenario. This is why tracking performance is such an important part of SEO. It tells you whether an approach is working or not. The key is patience. SEO delivers results over time, but they’re also more sustainable than the ones you might see with paid campaigns.