The Top 5 SEO KPIs for Publishers

13th April 2017Elizabeth

For any website, there are a certain set of basic SEO metrics to watch, to begin your technical analysis of performance. Organic Visits, Active Pages, Crawl Ratio – these are the foundation of SEO from which you build a strategy.

But the basics will only get you so far.

For Publishers at Enterprise scale, there are many more critical KPIs to measure and monitor, to ensure smooth progress and, ultimately growth in organic traffic and online revenue.

Here are the Top 5 SEO KPIs for Publishers

1. New Pages
2. Duplicate Content
3. HTML Tags
4. Number of Words
5. Inlinks

On a Publishing site, you’re already monitoring the basics for your most strategic pages: Sections, Categories, Tags, and Article pages. These next Top 5 metrics take your technical SEO analysis to the next level with detailed looks at precisely how your content and pages are performing and perceived in the eyes of Googlebot.

1. Are your latest Articles SEO-optimized?

You might publish dozens of new articles each and every day. That means dozens of new pages to ensure are well-optimized to be found, crawled, and indexed by Google.

Monitor the number of New Pages that have appeared in your site structure from one crawl to the next. Are they well optimized?

2. Avoid Duplicate articles

It’s quite common for publishers to find duplicate article pages, or pages with high levels of similarity. This, of course, can be damaging in terms of Google’s perception of content uniqueness.

Duplicate content or even high degrees of similarity can have a significant impact on organic performance. Monitor Content Quality of strategic pages like Articles and uncover content overlaps before they affect your success.

3. How unique are your meta tags?

With dozens of new articles every day, and thousands adding up over time, it’s all too easy for HTML Tags on Articles pages to become repetitive. Imagine you publish a new article each day about hot new topic – is each page’s Title Tag unique, despite how similar the subject matter is?

Over time, it’s easy to generate repetitive tags, which can have a negative impact on rankings. Keep an eye on the percentage of Article pages with duplicate HTML Tags to try to keep it to a minimum.

4. How does content length impact SEO traffic?

It’s easy to see a correlation between the length of the content on your pages and their performance in terms of SEO visits. For a Publisher, longer content on Article pages is more likely to go in-depth on a topic and provide value to the reader. Thin content, on the other hand, is likely to be of lower value to both the reader and to Google.

Track the average number of words (content size) on strategic pages and keep that number as high as possible to increase the likelihood of generating organic traffic.

5. Ensure Article pages are well-linked

Any Enterprise SEO worth his salt knows that internal linking is critical for how Google perceives the value of your content. Linking also impacts whether or not a URL will be crawled.

Article pages with high potential to generate traffic (middle-tail or even top-tail pages) must have a high number of inlinks. Most Article pages are Long-tail pages. Analyze crawled pages and their inlinks, and ensure that these pages receive at least the minimum number of inlinks to be crawled by search engines

What SEO KPIs are critical for your business?

Not a publisher? Check out the Top 5 E-Commerce SEO KPIs and stay tuned for more to come in this series!