How should our business be measuring our SEO performance?

Date: 17/11/2025

Subject: Local search engine optimisation / Bristol

 

Introduction

There is a considerable number of SME businesses nestled right across the South-West of England. This region of the country has a strong entrepreneurial spirit with many companies choosing to call Bristol home.

What unites these companies is that they often need to get their company website to the top of the first page of Google ( Google’s organic results and local business results). That’s need to get the business more visitors; therefore, you may need to invest in search engine optimisation actively.

There is a simply a huge number of Bristol SEO companies out there, so when you find the one that’s offering the services your business needs, naturally you start to think, well do they track SEO performance?

This article will decipher which metrics your business may wish to monitor, so that you can then ascertain as say the director of the company whether the SEO is improving or perhaps not as the case might be?

What you don’t want to do is follow vanity metrics, mumbo-jumbo graphs, or focus on keywords rankings for keywords that are not important to your business.

You will want your agency to create a simple report, one that instantly communicates how well businesses’ organic search engine optimisation is doing every month.

Let’s now dive into some of the statistics and figures that your business should be monitoring to see if the SEO is improving.

 

Organic Traffic (Google Analytics)

You will want to monitor your business’s organic traffic using Google Analytics.

Broadly speaking, you can categorise how customers find your website into three distinct ways: Google organic search results, local business results (Google Business), and Google Adwords.

Organic traffic is the metric that we will focus on here, as it’s what our marketing agency does best, that’s helping customers to increase their organic traffic. We can also help your business to appear more often in Bristol’s Google Business results. This is the 3 business results, which appear next to a map, which are often referred to as the “map results”.

For example, lets say you sell roof tiles online, you might sell potentially 100 different varieties of roof tiles on your e-commerce website.

When each customer finds you in the main section of Google’s organic results, this is when you can obtain a click, which is an organic visitor to your website.

 

Keyword rankings

The business will obviously want to rank as high as possible in Google’s organic rankings. The higher you rank for high-volume search terms on Google, the more customers will come to your business’s website.

That’s it, simply put, before a business starts putting together a monthly SEO report, you need to carry out keyword research, in order to understand, which keywords you should be optimising the website for.

Then monitor the organic traffic for these keywords. Use Google Seach Console as well as also Google Analytics to monitor organic traffic levels, as well as where your website ranks for certain keywords.

There are various SEO tools on the market, such as Moz Pro, as well as SEM Rush, to name a few, that you can use to monitor your business’s keyword rankings.

 

Bounce Rate

How high is your website’s bounce rate?

A website bounce rates can sound initially like a SEO term, that’s super complicated.

However, a websites bounce rate is an SEO metric that’s super simple to explain what it means.
Simply put, it’s the percentage of visitors who leave your company website after viewing only one page.

Why is a high bounce rate considered bad?
Generally speaking, when it comes to search engine optimisation, a business often focuses on metrics to be as high as possible, such as gaining an increased amount of organic visitors.

However, when monitoring the bounce rate, you want to be the complete opposite; you want the metric to be as low as possible.
The reason is that a high bounce rate is simply an indication that many shoppers in Bristol are disinterested with the website if they are leaving in there droves after visiting one page.,

If the shopper is leaving after visiting only one page, this suggests that they are not interested and don’t want to shop anymore on the website.

Therefore you will to decrease the bounce rate as much as possible.

 

Page Load Time

How fast is your website?

Let’s face it, we’re all impatient today, for example, imagine how you feel when you’re stuck in traffic in the city centre during peak rush hour? Things move very slowly, and this can be annoying when we need to get a move-on and be somewhere in Bristol.

Sure, it can be infuriating.

This is why you need a fast website, which is designed to be supersonic fast.

If you invest in high-quality hosting, your website should load faster, helping to lower your bounce rate because customers can get to the page they wanted faster.

 

How important are quality links?

Quality backlinks are what moves the needle and can sometimes blast businesses to the first page of Google.

As any good marketing agency will tell you however, that building quality backlinks is easier said than done.

However, having a strong backlink profile, one that is powerful in terms of having a lot of quality links, this can massively help improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

When hiring any Bristol SEO agency, note that the SEO report should note how many quality links have been built that month.

You might also want to note in the report how many links were lost during the month, because backlinks can actually be deleted from time to time.

For example, you might have a top-quality backlink from a national newspaper, such as The Financial Times.

However if the FT decides to delete that news story, lets say because the page too old, then this can mean your business loses a good quality backlink. Then in say Ahref’s it could be noted then as a “lost link”.

Therefore, the quality backlink might be deleted, which can impact your businesses search engine optimisation.

 

What are user engagement metrics?

So, think about dwell times again: that’s how long is the shopper spending on your website?

What are the dwell times for the website as a whole?

You can use Google Analytics to check this.

How long does the average shopper spend on the website?.

Are the shoppers leaving after a relatively short period of time?

If they are, it could be due to the U.X, which refers to the “user experience” of the website.

For example, if you have thousands of products, and lets say your website makes it difficult for customers to sort what’s in stock, plus what is out of stock, and sort items by price, for instance.

Shoppers will often need this sort of functionality on e-commerce websites, thats to make their lives much easier.

If they can’t sort items for them, otherwise they could simply leave to go to a competitor’s website instead.

Therefore, the dwell time and the bounce rate are highly connected to the user experience your website offers.

 

Therefore make sure of the following when improving a websites U.X:

– How fast is your company website?
– Are you offering the same functionality as a competitor? For example, sorting by in-stock or out of stock items?
– Is the text easy to read?
– Is the mobile version of the website easy to use?
– Can navigate using the main menu easily?

 

Find an agency that focuses on local SEO

If you’re based in the beating heart of Bristol, you might not want to attract customers across the whole of the United Kingdom. Instead you might want to focus on customers within a 10-mile radius around your business for example?

You might therefore want to gain as many local visitors as possible, therefore prioritise on finding an agency, that specialises in local SEO. That is exactly what we can offer at Digital Tailors, we are local SEO specialists.

 

High-quality content marketing is absolutely crucial.

Google needs to know what the website is about, therefore the business often has to write of text, we refer to this text as “content marketing”.
Writing content marketing includes, writing helpful guides, evergreen content, product descriptions, and blog posts.

 

Start to optimise for longtail keywords.

It’s a bit like entering a car race, when you enter one competition and win, you can start to build more confidence, and then you go after the more highly competitive races as your driving ability gets better and better.

This is also true for your business’s content marketing and organic search engine optimisation.

When you want to improve your SEO, you may want to target more low-competitive keywords, using long tail keywords to attract more customers, leading to increased business in a short period.
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Track your business’s SEO performance.

As you can see, SEO is all about working hard, implementing high-quality white-hat work, and then refining the strategies to generate the best results possible.

This business has over 10 years of experience in helping businesses in the South-West of England to rank on the first page of Google.

 

If you want one of the most experienced, knowledgeable and best agencies in the region working with you, then why not give us a ring?