The most important WordPress SEO factors

When you created your WordPress blog, you were probably only thinking about content at first. You wanted to deliver high-quality content, share something with the world or go public with your business. But once you took the step, you most likely quickly realized that there was more to consider and that success on the Internet can be measured, especially with a CMS like WordPress.

To measure the success of your WordPress blog, focus on SEO factors such as bounce rate, backlinks, visitor numbers, unique visitors, conversion rate, demographic data, relevant keywords, popular pages, traffic sources, dwell time, loading times and click-through rate.

In today’s post, I would therefore like to show you the most important facts and figures that exist in a WordPress blog. Metrics that you should definitely take a look at to measure your success and distinguish good from less good content. Because everything you do also has an impact on your visibility within search engines or on the number of your readers.

I would now like to show you which ranking factors play a particularly critical role. Here I will briefly describe the most significant values. If you pay attention to these figures and try to improve them, nothing will stand in the way of your success.

1. Bounce rate

The bounce rate describes the number of visitors who leave your website immediately after entering it. The value therefore includes those who do not take any action on your website and therefore leave immediately. The bounce rate is usually given as a percentage, i.e. in relation to all visitors. If the value is very high, this indicates that either the user experience is catastrophic or the content itself does not arouse much interest, which is why visitors leave again immediately.

Note: GA4 does not show the bounce rate by default. You can find instructions on how to do this here.

On the other hand, a high bounce rate can also be a positive value. For example, a low bounce rate in an online dictionary would indicate that the desired information was not found. On the other hand, a high bounce rate could indicate that the word looked up was explained immediately and in the best possible way, which is why users did not have to search any longer.

As the operator of a website, however, a low bounce rate is preferred because it allows users to consume further content or buy products. So if you cleverly redirect and inspire readers, you will mostly keep them on your website and therefore have a low bounce rate.

2. Backlinks

It’s basic with backlinks. The more backlinks, the better for the website in terms of search engine optimization. However, it is more exciting when backlinks come from similar sites. I therefore regularly take a closer look at my backlinks to find out who is linking to me and where and in what context this is happening. In this way, it quickly becomes clear which content works for backlinks (link magnets). It also leads to one or two collaborations, as I often reward friendly links with a message or comment in the appropriate place, which leads to common ground and conversations.

So I’m less interested in the highest possible numbers than in finding out exactly where the links come from and why they were linked to. That’s why backlinks are an important SEO key figures for me as a blogger, even apart from search engine optimization.

3. Visitor numbers

You can determine the success of your website in general relatively easily by looking at the number of visitors. Here you can quickly see how much interest there is and whether the topic you are blogging about is well received and accepted by visitors. The number is not reliable for advertisers, but it can be measured quickly and easily.

I have been using Google Analytics for all my websites for decades.

4. Unique visitors

When it comes to accurately measuring success and marketing your blog to advertisers, only unique visitors count. Users are measured very precisely here so that duplicate user visits do not even appear within the metric. The number is therefore significantly lower than the pure visitor numbers, which always include multiple visits and filter less strictly.

5. Conversion rate

Whenever you sell something on your website or even just offer it for download, it makes sense to keep a closer eye on the conversion rate. This is a percentage value that indicates how many of your visitors perform the desired action. The math is simple. If 100 visitors click on your link and 10 of them buy something, the conversion rate is 10 percent.

This value is mainly important regarding possible optimizations. How much does it change if the link text is worded differently? Or what happens if the link is given a different color? Does the conversion rate increase or decrease if the link is moved further down the page with a suitable image? If you want to sell something, you have to optimize it and this is only possible if the conversion rate before and after the optimization is known.

As I mainly do affiliate marketing here on bloggerpilot.com, I also track clicks on affiliate links as conversions in GA4. I implemented this via the Google Tag Manager.

6. Demographics

You usually know who you are writing for. However, that doesn’t mean that these people are reading your blog. You often think you have a specific target group, but then reach an entirely different one. Knowing this is crucial in order to fill your blog with suitable content and market it to the respective advertising customers. After all, they only book advertising where their target group is located.

You obtain demographic data automatically because the common analysis tools have already been able to find out a great deal about their users. They have long known who they are. Surveys on your website also help you to consolidate the image of your readership and find out exactly who they are.

7. Keywords

I get the currently ranking keywords from the Google Search Console.

The keywords must be selected specifically for each page. Although it is no longer common to simply adjust keywords, it should still be clear which topic and keywords you want to optimize the respective page for. If you are writing about car insurance, keywords such as “pizza dough” are logically of little use. However, each keyword has a different search volume and it is therefore important to find the keywords that have the most search queries in your subject area.

For normal blog articles, it is sufficient to target certain focus keywords. However, for existing pages that already rank, you can optimize for specific keywords to land at the top of the search engines. It is therefore just as influential to keep an eye on the keywords and, above all, their search volume as on all other values.

When I’m looking for new keywords for an article, I prefer to use the Keyword Magic Tool from Semrush. No other tool comes close to it.

8. Popular pages

Only if you know which content is particularly successful on your blog can you optimize the keywords or increase the conversion rate. It is therefore essential to know which pages are particularly popular. What are the top pages of the week, the month and of all time? This is exactly what you need to find out. Analytics tools as well as various WordPress plugins such as Rank Math can help with this.

As the most popular pages, posts and downloads etc. are almost always well received by the public, it helps if they are linked in the sidebar. This also leads to one or two clicks, a longer dwell time and therefore more satisfaction for the user.

9. Traffic sources

It is important to understand where the visitors to your blog actually come from. Do many of them come directly to your website, or do they come to you via a search engine? Are there particular traffic sources, such as Reddit or Twitter, that could be specifically supported? If you don’t know exactly where your visitors come from, you can’t optimize anything. It is also interesting to know how many visitors come directly to your blog. The more, the better, because direct visitors are usually regular readers who simply enter the URL in their browser.

If the majority of your visitors come via the “Organic Search” channel, this indicates a healthy website. If you also have a lot of direct traffic, your website is probably also known as a brand.

Your marketing strategy can then be adapted according to all these values. If all your visitors come via social media, you should perhaps create more snackable content and make sharing particularly easy. If, on the other hand, they are regular readers, you seem to be doing everything right. But then you could expand your target group to reach more readers on social media. Once you know where your visitors and readers come from, you can tailor your website accordingly.

10. Dwell time

While the bounce rate tells you how quickly your visitors leave, the dwell time primarily tells you how valuable your pages are. Because the longer a visitor stays on your blog, the greater their interest seems to be. And if the dwell time for an extensive article that takes ten minutes to read is only one minute, then you know that something about the article was not exciting enough to keep the reader interested. If that had been the case, they would have stayed for the full ten minutes to read the article in its entirety.

The dwell time only measures certain pages and not the entire blog. This makes it possible to check the quality of posts very specifically. It can only be more precise if the scroll depth is also analyzed in addition to the dwell time, but this can sometimes be a little more complex, which is why the scroll depth is not a standard value for me. Dwell time, on the other hand, is measured by almost every common analysis tool.

11. Loading times

Loading time also plays a decisive role nowadays when it comes to being at the top of search engines or being particularly popular with visitors. After all, hardly anyone waits several seconds for a website to load completely. If your blog does not appear almost immediately after being called up, many of the visitors are already gone again and click on another search result or simply change their mind. That sounds harsh, but unfortunately it’s the reality.

I can recommend WP Rocket to optimize your loading times. I use the plugin on all my sites and it saves me a lot of time.

Google also uses Lighthouse and the Core Web Vitals to measure very precisely how user interactions on a website work. Thanks to Google Chrome, there are even real insights and field data so that you can see exactly how well the respective website has been optimized. Loading times are a value that can be measured both simply and effectively.

12. Click rate

The click-through rate is measured similarly to the conversion rate, but practically without taking a closer look. This is purely about the number of clicks, not about successes, sales or similar. Click numbers can be important for testing the effectiveness of links in general. Does a link at the bottom of the article make sense or is it not clicked anyway? How high are the click rates in the menu and on the social media buttons?

You can find the click rate, or CTR, in the GSC. If you make the connection with Google Analytics, you will also find the data there.

Here, too, the values are used for optimization. If a menu is overloaded with links, visitors will no longer find the menu items that are critical to them. If links are not clicked, they can also be removed and no longer have a reason to exist. From experience, I can say that this in turn usually increases the number of clicks on the other links because the distraction decreases. As a result, your website will generally work better and generate more hits.

Don’t get lost in the data

All of these WordPress SEO factors are incredibly important, and yet you shouldn’t give them too much weight. What do I mean by that? It’s essential to know how many visitors are on your blog, which articles were particularly popular during the week, how long they stay and how long they take to load. Of course, all of this plays a role in optimizing and training your skills.

However, you need to know when to stop in order not to lose sight of the essentials. All values only work together in harmony. Blindly optimizing by the numbers won’t get you anywhere. Never lose sight of your own perspective, and don’t rely solely on the figures and values that your tools provide you with. In the end, these are always just numbers and some values are subjective in nature and simply cannot be measured.

You can find more articles and many guides for clever optimizations on my blog. Among other things, I show you how you can improve performance, SEO values and much more without losing focus.