Whether you are preparing for a monthly performance report or doing a more in-depth review quarterly you have to examine your KPIs and understand what’s beneath the surface. If you have an SEO company doing work for and they do regular reporting I recommend to insist on seeing more than just where your keywords rank. Rank alone does not tell you anything.

Web Metrics Every Marketer Should Use

1. Go beyond rankings -  look at referrals, conversions and revenue (closed loop).
   You want to paint a complete picture and get a clear overview of your sales funnel – the traffic from your website and what campaign it came from, the leads that resulted, and the number of customers you acquired.
2. Go beyond indexation – look at link popularity, reach, and source
   Pages come and go out of the index…they won’t necessarily stay. Take a look at what pages are being linked to and what sources are bringing those links, what sources are bringing traffic and ultimately what your reach looks like in terms of online authority among the linkarity and social media as well.
3. Check trend lines for your competitors
   When comparing yourself to your competitors use specific metrics. Compare link growth and quality. Tools like SEOMoz’s MozRank. Other tools to help you with traffic comparisons are trends.google.com/websites, www.compete.com, www.quantcast.com, and www.websitegrader.com.
4. Track and measure health of long tail keywords
   70% of searches online use long-tail keywords. These keywords typically have low search volume, but that’s okay – They are highly qualified, targeted, and you can get to the top of the results quickly. Analyze your traffic producing keywords and plan to create more content with them.
5. Compare % of search traffic  and conversions for brand and non-brand keywords
   What percentage of your natural search comes from brand keywords versus non-brand keywords? What does it mean if your keyword curve is dominated by brand terms? While branded keywords drive the most valuable traffic, it’s important to know how many unique keywords are used by people.
6. Look at how much content is added on a monthly basis
   It’s quite simple really. You can’t expect results if you are not putting the work into it. Have a plan if you or your team is not happy with your results.
7. Use what’s working
   Look at visits per keyword is there an opportunity to create more content, add new pages to your website, publish more via your blog, add more offers and landing pages. Also look at what works then rinse and repeat.

These are just a part of metrics which in my opinion should be used. They are certainly more useful than just the standard “keywords ranked”, “number of page views” or  “average time spent on site” which don’t tell too much about a specific case. I hope it’s also a good starting point for more advanced analysis in the future.