There’s more to knowing your SEO ranking than consulting the search engines. Although many companies list SEO success as one of their top priorities, many companies don’t know that your ranking isn’t the only or even the best way to ensure SEO. The hyper-focus on search engine ranking ignores the pages that, through technical problems, don’t show up on search engine results at all. It’s important not just to be interested in SEO but also making the most of the money you invest in it. Keyword rankings are still important, but they are by no means the only thing to which you should be paying attention.

Revenue is essential in SEO and all aspects of business, and indeed, a business owner should monitor their driver, or revenue and traffic, closely. However, many business owners don’t know that you can track the revenue that SEO generates as well. By connecting search analytics and search console on popular search engines, you can see the information about the revenue generated through organic search channels.

By tracking this data, you can see the correlation between your SEO efforts and actual revenue generation. You can also use the combination of analytics and search console to measure more specific variables, such as the number of pages visited, bounce rate, and time spent on site. When viewed with information about conversion rates, you can extrapolate this data into information about what pages do best and why and use that information to improve old content or create new content.

Rather than just watching SEO content, looking at revenue ranking can help put more specific information that search engine rankings don’t capture. For example, sometimes websites can generate a lot of clicks but few conversions, so revenue data is a vital metric to study.

Another critical aspect to consider is obstacle metrics, which measure indexing errors. That can help you understand the ways SEO process hasn’t worked. These crawl errors, when a search engine doesn’t register your website at all, can lead to an absence of organic searches and clicks in your SEO. For that reason, it’s essential to start with a foundational SEO approach so that you correctly index content on your website before trying to create new content.

You can find crawling errors on your site using search console services. In general, crawl errors are different between the mobile and desktop versions of your website. Since so much web traffic comes from smartphones, make sure to check for crawl errors on mobile specifically. Once you fix any errors, you should also pay attention to the number of pages crawled per day and the index status to ensure that all the pages of their website will eventually be searchable.

Once you’ve made these change, you can check the measurements for the metrics that directly affect them. By measuring the number of optimized pages and the number of visitors per page and multiplying them together, you can figure out the total amount of SEO traffic to your website. The number of optimized pages should be in the search console, and you can view them by going under organic search traffic and switching from keywords to pages. Then, count the number listed at the bottom of the paginator. If your site has fewer than 50,000 pages, you should aim for 50% to 75% total site pages to get traffic.

Those numbers should increase with more SEO. One method to improve page optimization is to increase the number of pages indexed. By dividing the total traffic by the number of optimized pages, you can see the number of visitors per page.

Rather than rely on page rankings to determine SEO, you can use this method to measure the improvements associated with SEO more accurately. These measures are the most important, but they work best in tandem with driver and obstacle metrics, detailed above. Tracking metrics in this way can ensure you get the best quality SEO for your investment.