Glossary

SEO Analytics Terms

56 essential terms for measuring SEO performance, including metrics, tools, reporting concepts, and KPIs.

9Traffic Metrics

Organic Traffic: Visitors who arrive at your site from unpaid search engine results. The primary goal of SEO efforts.
Sessions: A group of user interactions with your website within a given time frame. One user can have multiple sessions.
Users: Individuals who have visited your site. GA4 distinguishes between total users and new users.
Pageviews: The total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted multiple times.
Pages per Session: Average number of pages viewed during a session. Higher numbers indicate engaged users exploring your site.
New vs Returning Users: Breakdown of first-time visitors versus those who have visited before. Shows audience loyalty and discovery.
Direct Traffic: Visitors who arrive by typing your URL directly or from untracked sources. Can include some organic traffic with lost referrer data.
Referral Traffic: Visitors who arrive via links on other websites. Important for measuring link building and PR efforts.
Branded vs Non-Branded Traffic: Organic traffic from searches including your brand name vs generic keywords. Shows brand awareness and SEO success.

Bounce Rate: Percentage of sessions where users leave after viewing only one page. High bounce rates may indicate poor content match or UX issues.
Engagement Rate: GA4's replacement for bounce rate. Percentage of engaged sessions (10+ seconds, 2+ pageviews, or conversion).
Average Session Duration: Mean time users spend on your site per session. Longer durations typically indicate engaging content.
Time on Page: Average time spent on a specific page. Helps identify which content keeps users engaged.
Scroll Depth: How far users scroll down a page. Indicates whether users read full content or only see above-the-fold.
Exit Rate: Percentage of sessions that ended on a specific page. Different from bounce rate as it includes multi-page sessions.
Dwell Time: Time between clicking a search result and returning to the SERP. Not directly measured but theorized ranking factor.
Pogo-Sticking: When users quickly return to search results after clicking your listing. May indicate content doesn't match intent.

Impressions: Number of times your URLs appeared in search results, whether clicked or not. Shows visibility.
Clicks: Number of times users clicked through to your site from search results.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Percentage of impressions that resulted in clicks. Formula: Clicks ÷ Impressions × 100. Higher CTR = better optimization.
Average Position: Mean ranking position for your pages in search results. Note: position 1 is best; Google shows decimals.
Keyword Rankings: Where your pages rank for specific keywords. Tracked over time to measure SEO progress.
SERP Visibility: Aggregated score of how visible your site is across tracked keywords. Weights rankings by search volume.
Share of Voice (SOV): Your organic visibility as a percentage of total visibility for a set of keywords. Competitive metric.
Ranking Distribution: Breakdown of keywords by position ranges (1-3, 4-10, 11-20, etc.). Shows overall ranking health.

Conversion: When a user completes a desired action: purchase, form submission, signup, download, etc.
Conversion Rate: Percentage of sessions/users that result in a conversion. Key metric for measuring SEO ROI.
Goal Completions: Number of times users completed defined goals. Set up in Google Analytics to track conversions.
Micro-Conversion: Smaller actions indicating progress toward main conversion: email signup, content download, account creation.
Macro-Conversion: Primary conversion goals: purchases, qualified leads, subscriptions. The main business objectives.
Attribution Model: Method for assigning credit for conversions across touchpoints. Models include last-click, first-click, linear, and data-driven.
Assisted Conversions: Conversions where organic search was part of the journey but not the final touchpoint.
Revenue (E-commerce): Total monetary value generated from organic traffic. The ultimate SEO ROI metric for e-commerce.

Indexed Pages: Number of your pages stored in Google's index. Found in Google Search Console Index Coverage report.
Crawl Stats: Data on how Googlebot crawls your site: requests per day, download size, response time.
Coverage Errors: Issues preventing pages from being indexed: server errors, noindex, blocked by robots.txt, etc.
Core Web Vitals Scores: Field data from real users showing LCP, INP, and CLS performance. Available in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.
Mobile Usability Issues: Problems affecting mobile experience: small text, clickable elements too close, content wider than screen.
Page Experience: Google's umbrella metric combining Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and no intrusive interstitials.
Sitemap Status: Whether your submitted sitemaps were successfully processed and how many URLs were discovered.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Google's current analytics platform using event-based tracking. Replaced Universal Analytics in July 2023.
Google Search Console: Free Google tool for monitoring search performance, indexing status, and technical issues.
Ahrefs: Comprehensive SEO tool for backlink analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, and competitor analysis.
SEMrush: All-in-one marketing platform with SEO tools for keyword research, audits, tracking, and competitive analysis.
Moz Pro: SEO software suite offering keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, and link analysis.
Screaming Frog: Desktop crawler for technical SEO audits. Crawls sites to find issues with links, redirects, metadata, etc.
Google Looker Studio: Formerly Data Studio. Free tool for creating custom SEO dashboards combining multiple data sources.
Google Tag Manager: Tag management system for deploying tracking codes without editing site code directly.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator): Critical metrics that directly measure progress toward business objectives. For SEO: organic traffic, rankings, conversions.
Benchmarking: Comparing your metrics against past performance, competitors, or industry standards.
Year-over-Year (YoY): Comparing metrics to the same period last year. Accounts for seasonality in data.
Month-over-Month (MoM): Comparing metrics to the previous month. Shows recent trends but can be affected by seasonality.
Trend Analysis: Examining metric changes over time to identify patterns, seasonality, and the impact of changes.
Segmentation: Breaking down data by dimensions (device, location, page type) to uncover insights hidden in aggregate data.
Cohort Analysis: Analyzing behavior of groups who share common characteristics or time periods (e.g., users who found you in January).
Data Sampling: When analytics tools analyze a subset of data rather than the full dataset. Can affect accuracy in large datasets.