As a business person or content creator, you need to keep track of performance data that measure how you are doing—specifically, the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in your SEO strategy.

Here are eight essential metrics to track to know what's going on with your SEO efforts:

• Number of Referring Sites

The number of websites connecting to your website is often more important than the number of visitors it gets. Referring sites can help you rank higher and provide quality content for people and search engines to show in the results pages. Having a lot of referring sites indicates good link building efforts and social media mentions on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and more.

• Number of Social Media Followers

Your brand's number of total social media followers is a good gauge of your company's marketing efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube and others. Having a lot of followers can help you get more links back to your website through social media sharing.

• Site Speed

Google has confirmed over and over that site speed is an important ranking factor, so it's definitely something you should be monitoring. A slow website can make visitors leave because the load time makes them impatient, which means the visitor won't consume any of the valuable content on your website.

• Number of Blog Comments

The number of comments on your blog posts shows how in-depth people are reading your content and the users' level of interest in what you're writing about. This also indicates the quality and usefulness of search engines to show in the visitor’s results pages.

• Number of Downloads

The number of downloads for any given piece of content shows how many people are seeking out solutions. The number of downloads is also a good indicator that your site provides helpful, quality content.

• Number of Call-to-Actions

The number of call-to-action (CTA) buttons on your site tell you how much traffic you have and how interested your visitors are in what you are offering. A website with a lot of high-quality content but very few CTA buttons may indicate a problem with the conversion.

Tracking your KPI metrics is very important. If you have difficulties tracking them, get in touch with Anchor Digital. Visit their website for more details.