Everyone agrees that SEO is not an exact science. Much of what we do for SEO is based on assumptions and has a chance to work, but it’s often hard to tell if it does.
This is why it is essential to arm yourself with a few reliable KPIs to be able to both measure your results and identify new opportunities for optimization.
This article will look at the most important SEO KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and the tools that can help you find those metrics.
Measuring the effects of SEO will help you determine if you have chosen the best SEO strategy and will motivate you to continue optimizing your website.
Tracking SEO KPIs is not just about SEO performance
Goals and KPIs are essential parts of your SEO strategy that often get overlooked. It’s impossible to track the progress of your campaign without KPIs effectively.
It’s no secret that SEO takes time to deliver results, but by setting KPIs (key performance indicators), you can better demonstrate the impact of strategy on business.
SEO KPIs should be the foundation of your strategy and used to track progress and measure success.
Marketers do this because, in general, the primary objective of any business is to increase its profits.
You measure SEO KPIs and regularly review SEO efforts with your digital marketing team.
Regarding SEO KPIs, good website optimization involves reaching a more targeted audience while spending less money.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the most important KPIs you should use.
KPI #1: Organic traffic
Search engine traffic is the essential SEO KPI to track because it is the strategy’s ultimate goal.
The value of your SEO efforts can best be understood by comparing organic traffic over time, usually via a year-over-year graph.
How to check:
- Connect to Google Analytics.
- Click Acquisitions.
- Click All Traffic.
- Click Channels.
If possible, set a target date range of at least one month for monthly reports.
However, you can adjust according to the data of the period you need. For example, you can also use a previous period or year as a reference for your comparison.
Your organic traffic is less likely to fluctuate significantly as your website size increases.
A smaller segment of your websites, such as a blog, product catalogue, etc., or even a single page, will then be the focus.
Looking at their SEO traffic separately will give you a much more detailed picture of what’s going on with your search performance.
You can create custom segments or use the Google Analytics filter options to do this.
KPI n°2: Brand traffic
If people are actively searching for your brand, it indicates that you are doing something right.
Analyze your brand traffic by focusing on individual queries.
Branded traffic is generated when keywords containing your business name rank in the SERPs. Since these searchers are your direct customers, branded traffic typically converts at a higher rate.
In addition to branded traffic, segment your organic search and look at commercial traffic driven by keywords with clear purchase intent. These queries contain business terms such as “buy“, “order,” and “for sale“.
By focusing on the business component of your organic search, you can determine how well your business is positioned in the business niche.
Also, commercial traffic and brand traffic are ideal KPIs for marketers to track as they measure overall brand awareness.
In Google Search Console, you can view all of your brand’s queries, along with their impressions and clicks. And if you connect your Search Console to Google Analytics, you will have access to all these statistics in one place.
How to check:
- Connect to Google Analytics.
- Navigate to Acquisition.
- Choose Search Console.
- Choose “Queries” from the navigation bar, use the advanced filter and create a dimension to limit your search to queries containing your business name.
KPI #3: Keyword Ranking
This is where your website appears in SERP for specific keywords.
The higher your pages are ranked in search results, the more visitors you receive. Also, SEO traffic is sensitive to even minor changes in keyword rankings.
A single position change can affect thousands of users. It is essential to monitor keyword rankings and react quickly to changes.
Going back to 2015, keyword rankings were the only way to judge the performance of any SEO operation. But today, it’s different because of semantic search.
Historically, about five years ago, the vast majority of businesses tracked a small number of keywords and judged the success of their strategies based on those keywords.
However, times have changed, and today, when you produce a single piece of content, it can rank for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords.
How to check:
You can use your favourite SEO software’s keyword tracking or rank tracking feature.
It is essential to distinguish between what is known as a “Google dance” (a period during which Google rebuilds its rankings and results fluctuate wildly over three to five days) and an actual ranking drop.
If you notice a slight change in your ranking, wait up to a week to determine if it’s a glitch.
And if the situation doesn’t improve on its own, it’s time to take a look at the pages that have outranked you and borrow their optimization strategies.
KPI n°4: Organic CTR
Although CTR (click-through rate) is used as a ranking factor, the reality is that the higher your organic CTR, the more people will click through to your listing on the search engine results page.
This is something you need to track, both at the page level and at the query level.
to determine the relevance of your title tag, and your meta description on the snippet (the elements that appear in the SERPs) to a given query, the organic click-through rate (CTR) becomes extremely important.
Again, context is needed, and the average click-through rate (CTR) each position can expect to receive is as follows:
- Position 1: 31.73%.
- Position 2: 24.71%.
- Position 3: 18.66%.
- Position 4: 13.60%.
- Position 5: 9.51%.
- Position 6: 6.23%.
- Position 7: 4.15%.
- Position 8: 3.12%.
- Position 9: 2.97%.
- Position 10: 3.09%.
How to check:
It would help if you went to your Google Search Console, clicked on performance, and chose the page.
Now compare the CTR of your Google Search Console data with The mentioned ratios above.
By comparing your own CTR to this number, you will quickly see if you are performing better than average or if you need to improve your performance.
KPI n°5: Backlinks
Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, and there’s no sign that that will change anytime soon.
You need to be aware of the current state of your link profile, both in terms of identifying the new links you are earning and the toxic link issues that are popping up.
You should follow the following link metrics:
- Total number of backlinks.
- Total number of backlinks.
- Total number of referring domains.
- Number of lost links.
- Number of links earned.
- Toxic links.
It would help if you had SEO software to perform backlink analysis.
KPI #6: Visibility of organic search
There are two ways to measure and report on this indicator.
Even if impressions don’t translate into clicks, they’re a great way to demonstrate the continued growth of your site’s visibility.
These keywords rank higher but don’t drive your website traffic. This is the most common reason for this phenomenon.
Growth in impressions, on the other hand, is an excellent indicator of continued growth.
KPI n°7: The bounce rate
In addition to helping you determine if your content is attracting visitors, bounce rate can also help you determine how relevant your content is to the search queries it ranks for on Google.
Bounce rate is a metric that calculates the percentage of sessions where a user loads a page and then immediately leaves without performing any action.
Due to a high bounce rate, users are less likely to convert their traffic. Even small changes can make a difference, but you may miss the opportunity if you don’t follow them regularly.
How to check:
- If you use Google Analytics, you can find the bounce rate for your site and pages under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
A typical bounce rate is 40-60%, meaning that around half of all sessions should end with no action. However, this rate varies greatly depending on your industry or niche.
Search query is an essential priority for SEO algorithms.
When a user searches for a keyword, Google wants to show them the most relevant, high-quality results that address their problem.
KPI n°8: The average duration of the session
How long do your visitors typically spend on your site?
Are you trying to persuade them to stay longer?
By monitoring session duration, you will be able to assess the quality of your site and determine if changes need to be made to its structure.
You should create a thorough content structure for a longer session duration: internal links, breadcrumbs, hamburger menus, etc.
Session duration is an essential KPI because it indicates the quality of your site’s content and user motivation to stay, read, and click deeper into its architecture.
So, has anything changed to annoy your users if you notice a decrease in session times?
The more time a visitor spends on a page, the more effict they are.
And the more involved a person is, the more likely they are to convert.
Therefore, you should measure the average time spent on a page on your site, both site-wide and page-by-page, and think about ways to increase it if you see low durations.
KPI n°9: Visitor Loyalty
The number of returning visitors to your site is another important KPI to track to optimize performance.
As John Mueller reiterated, you need more repeat visitors, which helps build trust, authority, and brand awareness.
Building your permanent Audience is crucial because it shows that your site or business can create a long-term relationship. But also because you met your target audience in the field.
Audience retention rate is an important KPI for media outlets and bloggers because it shows how well they engage with visitors and whether users like their site and find its content helpful.
How to check:
To get started, under the Audience > Overview tab in , you can get a general overview of your new and returning visitors.
The percentage of sessions by returning users, number of page views per user, session duration, and other vital statistics about your site’s Audience are all available here.
Go to Audience> Cohort Analysis in Google Analytics to track this metric in more detail.
Set the cohort size and time interval, then select the user retention metric.
You’ll be able to see a breakdown by days, weeks, or months, as well as the percentage of users who returned to your website.
This way, you can measure the most successful campaigns you’ve run and see where you can improve.
KPI n°10: The conversion rate
While financial performance is the key indicator, many companies strive to achieve, getting results takes time. Therefore, you should not rely solely on return on investment.
Measuring and tracking organic conversions, whether sales, leads or both, depending on your business setup, is a reliable way to demonstrate your success.
Make sure you know the conversion benchmark before you start working on a campaign; otherwise, it will be challenging to demonstrate the increase over what was generated previously.
It is suggested that you use an average of conversions generated in the three months before the start of your campaign as a benchmark to measure growth.
How to check:
Conversions can be tracked in Google Analytics by measuring lead conversion goals and using the e-commerce report to track sales by channel.
KPI #11: Core Web Vitals
Google recently introduced Core Web Vitals, the latest user experience metrics and potential ranking factors.
For now, there are three “vitals”, all of which relate to page speed, but Google has hinted that other user experience metrics will be added in the future.
Even though there are many other technical SEO metrics, I think Core Web Vitals are the right KPIs to include in SEO dashboards because they will soon become the focus of optimization. Technical.
The report tracks technical issues over time, so it should be pretty straightforward to determine which website changes caused the problem.
Otherwise, the information includes a list of all matters discovered at the bottom of the page.
KPI n°12: SEO ROI
Whether you invest in an internal team and resources or an agency, you get more money back than you put in.
Tracking the ROI of your SEO activities is essential because it is the best measure of success, more money in the bank than you spend. However, remember that ROI can take time, often six to twelve months or more.
Know your ROI goal and regularly measure your performance against it to understand and report on improvement. You can calculate the ROI based on your SEO investment and channel revenue.
Not all measures need to be followed at the same time. Choose your KPIs according to the objectives of your project.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) help evaluate your SEO results.
State your goals in your essay.
What do you hope to accomplish? For example, if you want to increase the number of visitors by 35% by the end of the year, specify this objective in your writing.
Endorse the budget and Before you start, figure out how much you’re willing to spend on SEO.
Ensure you use the right SEO software or tracking tools like Google Analytics or CRM systems to track your customers.
To save time and get detailed reports, automate the tracking process to save time and effort.