Metrics

    We are often asked here at ROI how someone can tell if we are being successful in our social media and SEO endeavors. The gut reaction is to reply that if your telephone is ringing, if your inbox is overflowing and if your order department cannot keep up, we are probably doing a magnificent job.
All humor aside, Return On Initiative does use several "metrics" or measurements to track the progress of our efforts.
Alexa ranks websites from 1 to 30,000,000, with 1 being the best and usually Google. But they also supply useful information that you should be getting from the analytics you forgot to install on your site's back office: average visitor time on site, bounce rate, number of visitors, impact of social media, country popularity--these are all things you or your website guy/gal need to obsess over daily.
SemRush bills itself an online visibility platform and that works. Some of he information the free version supplies (up to 10 searches per day) is Authority Rank (which of course influences your Google position and hence is very important), organic search traffic, backlinks, keywords, and main organic competitors, the latter helping to identify domains and the attached websites that are competing with you for organic search traffic. 
Another tool we like is Check Page Rank, which tells the number that Google has assigned to your popularity on the familiar one to ten scale. But it goes beyond that, even supplying domain authority, trust flow, citation flow, and the ever popular spam score, the lower the number of which for you the better. 
The Hoth prides itself--and with good cause--with furnishing its users with their website's most popular keywords, their ranking on search engine results pages and the volume of those searches rounded to the nearest ten. Our advice with this organization is to stick with the free stuff. While there may well be value in the Hoth's ability to add links in what they describe as a white hat manner, we personally suspect that having someone else write vague articles on vague publications is just weird. Return on Initiative writes articles for our clients and publishes them specifically on LinkedIn, where they do the most good. But The Hoth's free tools are still terrific.
​HubSpot's Website Grader is a true gem. The free process scores your website on performance, SEO, Mobile and security, and tells you what you can do or get done that will improve your score and hence the experience you provide for your visitors.
​The BDC Website Assessment Tool is splendorific, if that's a word and it certainly should be. It provides a view of your social media presence, your reviews, your listings, your mobile speed and how many words are in your top five pages. Get down with the get down, people.
Ahref's Backlink checker does more than check backlinks. It provides an accurate domain rating from one to one hundred, the number of real backlinks to your website, a partial list of those backlinks, and the domain rating, url rating, referring domains and traffic of those backlinks. If you ever want proof that the quality of the backlink is more important than the number of them, this will prove it.
The Moz Link Research Overview will allow you ten free searches per month with highly detailed information about the number and efficacy of your website's backlinks.
These are only a few of the assessment tools available online. But we have found these to be of these highest value and believe you will as well.