SEO Metrics That Matter: What Should You Track To Measure Success?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is as important in 2025 as it was in 1997, when the term was first used. However, the practices that businesses use to optimise their sites to rank more highly on search engine results have changed quite a bit in the last 28 years, in response to the search engines themselves becoming more sophisticated and accurate. In this article, we will look at the key SEO metrics to track this year and how to interpret them.

1. Organic Search Traffic

Organic traffic is the total number of visitors who arrive at your website through unpaid search results (as opposed to paid adverts), and is one of the clearest indicators of success with SEO. A steady uptick in organic traffic indicates that your content is resonating with your intended customers and is satisfying search engine algorithms for relevance and authority. When measuring organic traffic, focus on high-value traffic, because it’s not just how many visitors you get but whether these visitors are likely to convert. To borrow an example from the high street, it’s not total footfall that is important to a manager of Flannels, but how many of these shoppers have the budget and intent to purchase luxury goods.

2. Keyword SERP Rankings

Keyword rankings on Google are the gold standard of SEO, and essentially reveal how your site performs in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for customer search queries. High visibility for important keywords is important for driving consistent and relevant traffic to your website. How Google determines which pages should rank where is still up for debate, but the Google MUM (Multitask Unified Model) Algorithm seems to prioritise context as the most important ranking factor, so it’s important that your keywords align closely with user intent.

Another trend to be aware of is voice search optimisation for users using mobile devices, so consider tracking your SERP position for ‘conversational’ and longtail keywords, especially if you are targeting local customers.

3. Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric created by American search marketing pioneer Moz (formerly SEOMoz) in 2010 to determine the likelihood of a website or page ranking highly on Google. While never formally endorsed by Google, DA has stood the test of time and is still a decent way of evaluating the overall performance of your website for SEO.

Domain authority uses a score range from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater probability of achieving a high rank. Broadly speaking, a DA of 51 to 70 signals ‘strong authority’, and is a good place to aim for with a business website. Scores of 71 - 100 are ‘very high authority’ and are normally reserved for large national and international brands (e.g. Amazon, eBay), and authoritative non-commercial sites such as Wikipedia and Gov.uk. Scores falling below 50 indicate ‘low to moderate authority’ with room for improvement. Domain authority lets you compare your website’s relative search strength to other competitors in your market, giving you a good benchmark for improvement.

Domain Authority is calculated based on your backlink profile. Backlinks are links from external websites linking back to your site. The more high-quality backlinks from unique domains, the higher your DA score. You could lose points from spammy or low-quality backlinks, so as with everything in digital marketing, quality matters. High-quality content and good search engine performance can also improve your DA.

4. Core Web Vitals

Let’s get technical for a moment. One of the important SEO trends in 2025 is Google’s focus on page loading metrics Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which are measures of how well your website user experience (UX) is designed. These are the so-called Core Web Vitals, but what do these chewy acronyms actually mean in practice?

Largest Contentful Paint

LCP measures the time needed for the largest visible content (e.g. an image, video, or text block) to load on the user’s screen – i.e. load time. Fast websites are good websites, and a good benchmark for LCP should be 2.5 seconds or less from when the page starts loading.

First Input Delay

FID is another load speed metric, indicating the time it takes for a webpage to respond to the first user interaction, such as clicking a button or link. You should generally aim for an FID of 100 ms or less, so that your site feels fast and responsive.

Cumulative Layout Shift

CLS indicates the stability of your website by measuring how much the structure or layout shifts unexpectedly when it loads. For example, a slow-loading image or advert could cause text or other elements to shift relative position on the user’s screen. Google likes a low CLS that gives users a predictable and seamless browsing experience, and from a customer perspective, it prevents them from accidentally clicking the wrong element!

5. Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR indicates the percentage of users who click through to your website after seeing it on a Google results page. A good CTR shows that your page title and meta descriptions are successful in capturing viewer interest and are well aligned with user intent. Use Google Search Console to get detailed insights into your CTR for individual webpages and articles – this will highlight any underperforming pages and allow you to refine the headlines and meta descriptions.

6. Bounce Rate And Engaged Sessions

Visitors ‘bounce’ when they visit a webpage and then quickly leave without taking any meaningful action, and without visiting any other pages. Reasons for bounces include irrelevant content, slow page loading times, outdated page design, and other factors, all of which can undermine your SEO results. Bounce rate is, therefore, one of the most important SEO metrics, and is one that businesses aim to keep as low as possible.

However, in 2025, the metric has become more nuanced, with Google placing more emphasis on engaged sessions or engagement rate than pure bounces. This makes it a more useful and revealing metric. In Google Analytics 4, ‘meaningful interactions’ are emphasised over single page visits. Here’s an example to show you how this works. Using bounce rate, if you had arrived on our site, spent 50 seconds scanning this blog and then left without visiting another page, that would be a ‘bounce’.

However, using engagement rate, this would count as an ‘engaged session’– because there’s every chance of you coming back again and you could still share this page with 10 of your friends on LinkedIn (right!?). Engagement rate gives you a better understanding of which content assets, pages, campaigns, and channels drive the most meaningful interactions and engagement than bounce rate alone, allowing you to better allocate your marketing resources.

What Next?

As search engine optimisation evolves, the metrics that indicate user engagement are becoming more nuanced, informative, and useful. For more information about modern SEO and how to improve your results on Google and other search engines, please contact JDR today by calling 01332 343281 or by clicking here.

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