What One SEO Metric Would You Choose?

[eyeflow]

If you had to choose one SEO metric to measure a site's SEO performance what would it be? I know you shouldn't use one metric, but lets say you had 10 seconds to assess how well a site was probably doing from an SEO perspective. What metric would it be?

*I also asked this question on the inbound forms.

[eyeflow]

Cool thanks, I didn't catch that one. Apparently my title wasn't that original

[MattAntonino]

There was an article on Moz not that long ago that attempted to answer this same question:

http://moz.com/blog/one-metric

It's a good read - probably too complex to use in an agency/bulk setting but pretty useful overall.

[EGOL]

I author articles for Adsense revenue and my metric is

income from the article / cost of article production

Cost of article production includes my time, webmaster, photography, graphics, etc.

This metric begins at zero and when it gets to 1 then you have broken even.  The metric will improve as long as the article is on the web and being viewed.

If you want a slightly different metric that is probably more valuable then ....

cost of article production / average monthly income from the article over past 12 months

... because it gives you an estimate of how many months it will take at current income rate to recover your cost.

I think that it is more valuable to measure your performance article-by-article because then you know what types of content are performing the best - and that can inform future content development.

This type of metric is based upon the assumption that you are creating evergreen content that will be on the web for years rather than creating newsy content that will be consumed and outdated in a week - but similar shorter term metric could be used there.

I also have retail sites and write lots of product-related content.  This content is written to drive traffic to sales pages and to display adsense.   I keep an eye on how many sales each of these articles are producing and that also informs the development of future content.

[MonicaOConnor]

Hard to say, my first reaction would be the amount of traffic generated organically. I am tempted to say the number of key terms on page one, however, you can have 100 words on page one and get no clicks if your SEO is bad. You need good snippets, HTML data and engaging data. If your site is generating organic traffic in high percentages, and generating traffic consistently organically, I would say that can be a very top level metric.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Quality UGC - comments, threads, reviews, etc.

This means that the site 1) gets REAL traffic (cause its hard to fake) 2) impresses visitors enough so that they take the time to engage with the content (which means the site is high quality).

Everything else can be faked and you wouldn't catch it in 10 seconds.