Search engine optimization is a complex and ever-changing process. To keep up with the competition, you must continuously monitor your SEO performance and make improvements where necessary. So, if you’re looking for ways to evaluate your SEO team’s performance, you should track SEO KPIs.
But with so many KPIs to choose from, it can be challenging to know which ones will give you the most insights into your SEO team’s performance, and your efforts may be a waste if not done correctly.
To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of the top 10 SEO KPIs you need to track for success. By monitoring these KPIs, you’ll be able to evaluate your team’s progress, identify areas of improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your SEO efforts. Let’s get started!
What Are SEO KPIs?
SEO KPIs (or Key Performance Indicators) are a set of quantifiable metrics that measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. They help you track progress toward your SEO goals so that you know whether or not you’re on track to achieve them.
You’ll find many SEO KPIs out there, but they all have one thing in common: they’re metrics that can be easily measured and tracked over time. Although your SEO strategy may take time to yield visible results, establishing KPIs can better determine how your strategy is influencing business.
Benefits of Tracking SEO KPIs
You can only mention SEO KPIs if you discuss their enormous benefits to every site owner. If you’re running an SEO campaign and you are not tracking your SEO KPIs, you are missing out on a lot of benefits. Some of the benefits of tracking SEO KPIs include:
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KPIs Help You Measure Your SEO ROI
It can be frustrating if you don’t know whether your business is making profits from its SEO marketing investment. After all, no one wants to invest without seeing the result of their investment. However, with KPIs, you can measure your SEO ROI (return on investment). This way, you’ll be able to see how your campaign is performing and how much profit and quality leads it generates.
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Help You Figure Out Where Your SEO Strategy Went Wrong
By regularly tracking SEO KPIs, you can spot trends and patterns that may indicate areas where your business failed and where you could do better. This way, you can rethink your marketing strategy or improve your product selection. Whatever the case, your KPIs can help you identify areas of your business that need attention.
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It Lets You See if You’re Making Progress Toward Your Business Goals.
Your SEO objectives are a subset of your overall business objectives, which they significantly impact. By tracking specific SEO KPIs, you can get a clear picture of your progress and whether or not your business is achieving its goals. If you’re not making the progress you desire, you’ll be able to adjust your business approach and SEO strategy.
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It Helps You to Know Which SEO Strategy You Should Prioritize.
Every SEO strategy has key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help them track their progress and gauge their success. By monitoring these KPIs, you’ll see how your SEO campaign impacts your business and make informed decisions about where to allocate your resources and focus your efforts.
The Top 10 SEO KPIs to Track
When it comes to SEO, there are many things to keep track of—from keywords to website traffic to conversion rate. And while it’s essential to keep track of all these things, it can be difficult to know which metrics are the most important to focus on, and this is where KPIs come in.
So which KPIs should you be tracking? Here is a list of the top ten important ones:
- Organic Traffic
- Keyword Ranking
- Backlink
- ROI (Return on Investment)
- Track Conversions
- Bounce Rate
- Cost Through Rate (CTR)
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
- Page Speed Metrics
- Branded Traffic
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the traffic that comes to your website through organic or natural search results. It means that traffic has not been acquired through paid ads or other marketing means. Instead, it comes through users searching for relevant keywords or other SEO factors.
SEO aims to make your website rank on SERPs, increase your company’s search visibility, and attract new visitors without spending much money on ads. In simple terms, you need SEO to increase organic traffic.
Organic traffic is one of the most important SEO KPIs because it is a good metric for tracking the progress of your SEO efforts. Since organic traffic is an indicator of the health of your website and its SEO, the best way to check if your visitors are growing consistently month after month is by tracking your organic traffic KPI.
Google Analytics is the most common tool that offers you the benefits of tracking your organic traffic and performing other SEO activities, such as link prospecting. If you use Google Analytics, you can easily track daily searches in your site traffic with the following steps:
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- Go to “Audience”
- Select “Overview report”
- Click on “Add Segment”
- Select the “Organic Traffic” field.
2. Keyword Rankings
Keyword ranking depicts your website’s ranking position for specific keywords in search engines. This helps you know the spot your website appears on SERPs when users search for a particular keyword. The higher your rank, the more likely people will click on your website.
Tracking keyword ranking for a particular page or content can give you insights into which keywords are performing well and which ones need more work. There are a few different ways to track keyword ranking, but the most common method is using Google Analytics.
You can also use other paid services and tools like Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc., to track your website’s keyword rankings over time and provide you with detailed reports. Alternatively, you can manually check your website’s position in SERPs by searching for your target keywords and noting your website’s position. However, this last method could be inaccurate, as your website’s rank also depends on other SEO factors.
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are essential as KPI for SEO optimization because they signal to search engines that your site is popular and trustworthy. Search engines view backlinks as votes of confidence; the more high-quality backlinks you have, the more likely you rank high in SERPs.
So, you must be aware of the current state of your backlink profile, both in terms of identifying any new links you earn and any issues with spammy links that appear. Some SEO KPI metrics you should look out for when evaluating your backlinks include:
- Total number of backlinks: The total number of backlinks you have on your website is an indication of how high your PageRank is.
- Broken or lost links: With time, you lose some links and, consequently, their value. This can be due to the referring domain removing some pages or when URLs are replaced during a site redesign. You should identify and fix these issues.
- Total number of referring domains: These are websites from which your site has one or more backlinks.
- Number of new links earned: Knowing the number of unique links you acquired over time indicates whether your link building strategy is effective.
- Spammy backlinks: Unnatural or spammy links can hurt your site’s organic performance, and tracking your backlink is the most effective way to identify such issues so that you can take action to protect your rankings.
4. ROI (Return on Investment)
By tracking ROI KPI, you can get a better idea of whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off. As one of your SEO key performance indicators, ROI is a way to measure how much you’re getting back from what you’re putting in. In other words, it is an essential metric that helps you know if you’re running a profit or loss on your SEO campaign.
When it comes to SEO, ROI can be tricky to calculate, and because SEO is an ongoing process; it can take months or even years to see the full benefits. However, you can track the ROI of your SEO efforts by comparing how much you’re spending on SEO to your revenue. Do you have an increase in revenue over the period you started your campaign?
5. Track Conversions
Conversion rate is a key metric for any website or online business that measures how well your site can turn visitors into customers or leads. You can have a lot of organic traffic, but they may be irrelevant if they are not generating leads.
When you have a high conversion rate on your website, you need to find out how they got there so that you can track which strategies are working and keep promoting your effective tactics.
Your conversion could be from:
- Users are filling out your questionnaire.
- Visitors are reading your article.
- Subscription to email letter OR channel
- Online purchases
Also, you can track your website’s overall conversion rate or different landing pages to check which gives the highest conversion per time.
6. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is one of the most important SEO KPIs because it tells you how many people leave your site after viewing a page. A high bounce rate means people aren’t finding what they’re looking for on your site, which could signify that your site needs more work.
However, it depends on the goals you are trying to achieve. If your website is content-based, a high bounce rate could mean people come to your website, find the content they are looking for on the page, and then leave. However, if your website is an ecommerce website, a high bounce rate could indicate a problem.
The reasons for a high bounce rate can be any of the following:
- Content is different from what the users want.
- The website is not well-optimized for mobile
- Your website has a bad user experience, like slow page speed or many ads.
You can reduce bounce rates by optimizing your website and making it mobile-friendly.
7. Click Through Rate (CTR)
Click Through Rate (CTR) is a key performance indicator for SEO campaigns. It measures how often users click on a particular search engine result when it appears in the SERP. CTR measures how relevant your ads or organic results are to users and how more likely they are to click on them.
There are a few different ways to track CTR. Some of these include:
- Look at your overall website traffic. If you see an increase in traffic to your website, that’s a good sign that your CTR is up.
- Check your Google Analytics account. You can get a report that shows you the average CTR for your site and which pages and keywords have the highest CTR.
- Use a third-party tool like Moz or SEMrush. These tools track CTR for you and give you detailed reports on how your CTR is changing over time.
- Do it yourself: Divide the number of ads or link clicks by the number of ad impressions and multiply the result by 100 to determine your CTR
If you want to improve your CTR, there are a few things you can do:
- Optimize your titles and meta descriptions: Use keyword-rich phrases in your titles and meta descriptions. This will help your result match what users are searching for, making them more likely to click.
- Write clear headlines and use rich snippets or other SERP features to stand out from the crowd.
8. Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost per acquisition is one of the KPIs that measures the cost of acquiring a paying customer through a given marketing channel. CPA tells you how much you paid to convert a customer. You can calculate your CPA by dividing the total cost of conversion by the total number, which gives you the average price per acquisition for each customer you acquire through ad traffic.
9. Page Speed Metrics
Page speed is the time between a user’s request for a page and the browser’s completion of processing and rendering the content. It’s important to track your page speed KPI because it can affect your conversion rates and other SEO benefits.
Some of the page speed metrics include:
- Page load time: This tells you how long it takes to load a page, including the graphics, completely.
- Page timings report: It lets you see the average load times for individual pages. For example, your website might load slower if you have some heavy graphics pages. So, the page timing report only tells you which pages are slow.
- The speed index is defined as the rate at which page contents are visibly populated.
- Page speed insights identify which parts of your website are performing poorly in page speed and provide an overall score from 0 to 100 (with 100 being the best) for both mobile and desktop pages. It then categorizes your performance and suggests opportunities and diagnostics for maximum change.
10. Branded Traffic
Branded traffic is organic traffic that comes from people who search for keywords that contain your company name. It is an essential key performance indicator to evaluate your brand awareness.
Tracking branded traffic is important because it has the highest conversion rates. After all, the user already knows what they want when they search for the branded keywords. You can use Google Search Console to track branded traffic KPIs by following these steps:
- Log into Google Analytics.
- Navigate to Acquisitions > Search Console > Queries.
- Choose the time frame.
- Identify all potential variations and forms of your brand name (including variations).
- Fill in the Search Console’s filter with keywords related to your brand name.
- Evaluate the total number of clicks and impressions and how they change (or do not change) over time.
Importance of Properly Tracking KPIs
There are a lot of different metrics you can track and use to measure the success of an SEO campaign, however, you can’t use all of them at once. The most important thing is selecting the right ones to use at the right time.
When you properly and regularly track your SEO KPIs, you can evaluate how well your site is performing, know what needs to be done, and make better decisions to improve it.
Conclusion
The most important thing to remember is that there is no one size fits all approach to tracking your SEO KPIs. You need to know your goals and which metrics will help you reach them. And by tracking the suitable KPIs, you can check to see if you’re on track to reach your SEO goals.
But if you overlook tracking the right SEO KPIs, you might be on the way to making wrong decisions about your marketing strategy. So, whatever your business or SEO strategy is, be sure to track important KPIs!