A friend messaged me today asking if some numbers around his website were “good”. It’s such a complex question, so here’s a complex set of numbers you could (and maybe you should) measure on your website. Whether or not they’re good would have to line up with your own business and personal goals.
Ahrefs Site Audit Metrics
Run a site audit on ahrefs and then …
Get this number to 100%
- Health Score: Overall percentage indicating your site’s SEO health
Then get all these numbers to zero:
- Broken links and 404 errors: Links that lead to non-existent pages, creating poor user experience
- Redirect chains and loops: Multiple redirects before reaching the destination page, slowing down user experience
- CSS/JavaScript errors: Code problems that can break page functionality
- Canonical tag issues: Problems with tags that tell search engines which version of similar pages to prioritize
- Robots.txt problems: Issues with the file that tells search engines which pages to crawl or ignore
- XML sitemap issues: Problems with the file that helps search engines discover and understand your site structure
- Structured data implementation issues: How well your site uses schema markup to help search engines understand content
- Indexability issues: Problems preventing pages from appearing in search results
Moz Metrics
Run a domain analysis check on Moz.com and then look at …
- Domain Authority (DA): Score predicting how likely a domain is to rank in search results (1-100) - aim for 15 or higher. A new website starts at 1
- Page Authority (PA): Score predicting how likely a specific page is to rank (1-100)
- Spam Score: Indicator of how spammy a site appears to search engines - aim for 0%
- Follow vs. nofollow links ratio: Balance between links that pass and don’t pass SEO value - a 90%/10% split apparently is the goal here
- Linking domains: Variety of different domains linking to your site - the more in your topic sphere and geographic region, that are trustworthy, the better
- Ranking Keywords: Where and how many of your pages appear in search results for specific terms - all the pages ranking number 1 is my favourite number here.
- SERP feature visibility: How often your site appears in featured snippets, knowledge panels, etc.
- Featured snippet opportunities: Potential to appear in special highlighted search results
- Top pages performance: Which pages on your site attract the most traffic and links
Google PageSpeed Insights / Core Web Vitals
Run a Page Speed test and look at getting all these numbers down to zero which means the top scores should all be 100/100:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Time until the largest content element is visible (should be under 2.5s)
- First Input Delay (FID): Time until the browser can respond to user interaction (should be under 100ms)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Amount of unexpected layout shifts during page loading (should be under 0.1)
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): How quickly the server sends the first byte of response
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): When the first content appears on screen
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures overall responsiveness to user interactions
- Total Blocking Time (TBT): Time during which the page is unresponsive to user input
- Speed Index: How quickly content is visually displayed during page load
- Time to Interactive (TTI): When the page becomes fully interactive
- Server response times: How quickly your server responds to requests
- Resource load times: How long it takes to load images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.
- CSS/JS minification: Whether code is compressed to reduce file size
- Image optimisation: Whether images are properly sized and compressed
- Cache policy implementation: How effectively your site stores resources locally to speed up repeat visits
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools Metrics
Check out all your Google search console and Bing webmaster tools stats:
- Impressions: How many times your pages appeared in search results
- Clicks: How many times users clicked through to your site from search results
- Click-through rate (CTR): Percentage of impressions that resulted in clicks
- Average position: Average ranking position in search results
- Index coverage: Status of your pages in Google’s index
- Mobile usability: Issues affecting how your site works on mobile devices
- Core Web Vitals status: Whether your pages meet Google’s performance standards
- Rich results performance: How your enhanced search listings are performing
- URL inspection status: Detailed information about specific URLs
- Security issues: Detected security problems affecting your site
- Manual actions: Penalties manually applied by Google reviewers
- Links to your site: External websites linking to yours
- Internal links distribution: How links are spread across your own pages
- Crawl stats: Data about how Google crawls your site
- Sitemap status: Whether your sitemap is properly submitted and processed
Website Analytics
Look at your website analytics:
- Bounce rate: Percentage of visitors who leave without interacting with the page
- Average session duration: How long users typically spend on your site
- Pages per session: Average number of pages viewed during a visit
- Conversion rate: Percentage of visitors who complete a desired action
- Scroll depth: How far down pages users typically scroll
- Heat map analysis: Visual representation of where users click, move, and pause
- User flow paths: Common navigation routes through your site
- Exit pages: Pages where users most commonly leave your site
- Return visitor rate: Percentage of visitors who come back
- Device type usage: Distribution of visitors across desktops, tablets, and phones
- Browser usage distribution: Which browsers your visitors use
- Geographic engagement differences: How behavior varies by location
- Error rates: Frequency of user-encountered errors
- Form completion rates: Percentage of started forms that get submitted
Business Performance Metrics
Then you’re ready to get nerdy:
- Revenue per visitor: Average money earned from each site visitor
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): Revenue generated per dollar spent on advertising
- Cost per conversion: How much you spend to achieve each conversion
- Attribution model insights: Understanding which channels drive conversions
- Visitors-to-customers ratio: Percentage of visitors who become customers
- Lead quality score: Assessment of how likely leads are to convert
- Sales cycle length: Time from first contact to purchase
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measure of customer satisfaction
What Really Matters To Me: Money Metrics
And honestly the only thing that matters to me is putting food in my kid’s mouths:
- Conversion rate: Percentage of visitors who become paying customers - directly impacts revenue
- Revenue per visitor: Average amount each visitor contributes to your bottom line
- Cost per acquisition: Total cost to acquire a paying customer, affecting profitability
The true measure of a website’s effectiveness is how efficiently it turns visitors into paying customers.
You can have excellent technical metrics, but if your visitors-to-customers ratio isn’t improving, then your other optimisations may not be delivering business value.
But the truth is that you need to get the technical metrics - page speed and the top half of this post - in order so the algorithims will put your page forward.