Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
There was once the everyday mantra of the everyman SEO consultant that said your PageRank ("PR") is the most critical metric for tracking the performance of your search engine ranking improvements.
"PageRank?" Most clients would say, "what's that?"
To which the everyman SEO consultant would roll into an explanation of quality inbound links and the value links have to the pages they link to and so on. However today, PageRank is only one in many metrics the everyman SEO consultant should be talking about. Nowadays, Google is more interested in "engaged web pages". Ok, hold the phone once again! "Engaged web pages… what is that now?"
If you imagine a website that is top of the search engine listings and is therefore clicked regularly, however the website simply doesn't deliver the correct message to enough visitors. Would you consider such a site worthy of the top position? No is our guess and this is Google’s feeling also. Google wants to deliver quality content quicker and it gauges quality based on the duration and interaction a visitor has with each website. This is what engagement is and is what you should certainly track within your analytics on a weekly and monthly basis.
However, don't rush off to Google Analytics just yet. There isn't an "Engagement" button or nice pretty graph in Google Analytics, not yet anyway.
You need to keep track of the following statistics and try to get them to improve over time;
Bounce Rate
You want to see the number of people that visit and then move straight away reduce over time. You are always going to have a bounce rate, but you don’t need to be too concerned about it when it hits 25% or less.
Page Views
Page views are the average number of pages each visitor looks at each visit. Again, once this is above 3 you're doing ok, but try to increase this to at least 5. (It's a tall order for most, but worth increasing this).
Clickthrough Rate
This is the number of times your website is displayed in a search engine result compared to the number of clicks it receives. For example, if your website is displayed in search results 100 times but clicked on only once, your click through rate will be 1%. For SEO and organic searches your clickthrough rate should be 50% or more, however if you also run AdWords or PPC campaigns a clickthrough rate of 3% is good.
You can read more about some of Google's recommended actionable metrics here.
