If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." - Peter Drucker
For every business or marketing team, SEO strategy is always a hot topic of discussion when it comes to generating organic results.
However, is it the only thing we should be concerned about?
Can we achieve our desired results simply by creating an effective SEO strategy?
Definitely NO!
Having just an SEO strategy is not enough. The key to success is tracking the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and using that data to improve your strategy.
If you are an SEO expert, you already know the nitty-gritty of SEO KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). However, the aspects of SEO KPI may not be clear if you are an SEO amateur or an entrepreneur.
This article will discuss the importance of SEO KPIs and the essentials that every business should target. Moreover, you will even learn tips on effectively using SEO KPIs to improve website and marketing campaign performance.
What Are SEO KPIs?
SEO KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are metrics used to measure the success of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of an SEO strategy and can help businesses identify areas for improvement.
For example, one important KPI for an e-commerce business can be the percentage of website visitors who add items to their cart.
Tracking this KPI over time allows businesses to identify trends and determine whether their SEO efforts can make a major difference to their ROI or not.
Other common SEO KPIs include keyword rankings, organic traffic, and conversion rates. By tracking the right KPIs, businesses can make data-driven decisions and optimize their SEO strategy for maximum success.
Importance Of Tracking KPIs Of An SEO Campaign
Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, says, 'Without proper tracking and measurement, it's impossible to know whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off.' SEO is a long-term strategy, and measuring results along the way is important to optimize your efforts and achieve your goals.
With the constantly changing algorithms of search engines, businesses need to set SEO goals and track them, and the best way to do so is by using key performance indicators (KPIs). Some of the benefits of tracking SEO KPIs include the following:
- Monitor Progress
- Finding areas to improve
- Get data-driven performance insights
- Demonstrate ROI
Do you want to begin measuring SEO efforts but are unsure where to begin? Or maybe you're stuck trying to choose KPI for SEO optimization even though you know what to track.
Let's go through a few crucial SEO performance indicators that need to be tracked for every campaign.
1. Organic Traffic
The whole idea of SEO is to optimize your website so that it ranks well in search engine results pages so that people can easily find and visit your website through search engines like Google.
Organic traffic is the number of users who visit your website by clicking on the links on the pages that appear in search engine results. In addition, businesses often run marketing campaigns like paid ads, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.
It's important to differentiate the type of traffic that has been achieved. Traffic attained from all your marketing campaigns is not necessarily organic.
Why Organic Traffic Is A Crucial KPI For Your SEO efforts:
- Improving Your Visibility in Search Results
- Measuring the Quality of Your Website's Content
- Identifying and Fixing Issues with Your Website
- Discovering Opportunities for Growth
How To Track Organic Traffic:
To distinguish between organic and all other traffic types, you can use the Google analytics tool.
Login to your account.
Go to the "Acquisition" section on the left of your Google Analytics dashboard.
Click on "All Traffic" and then "Source/Medium".
Now look for the "Organic" in the "Medium" of the given traffic sources.
These rows will show the number of visitors who found your website through a search on a search engine, such as Google.
You can use the date feature on the top right of your google analytics dashboard to analyze data for any particular time frame.
2. Domain Authority & Page Authority (DA/PA)
DA and PA are the terms coined by Moz. Moz is an SEO tool that helps you to analyze your website's SEO performance and provides you with insights that can help you to improve your SEO execution.
DA and PA are scores that range from 1 to 100, with a higher score indicating a higher level of authority. These scores are calculated based on several factors, including the number and quality of external links pointing to a website (i.e. backlinks) and the relevance and credibility of the linking domains.
Why Important:
- Allows you to understand the strength of your competitors' websites
- Indicates the level of authority and trustworthiness of a website
- Reflects the power of a website's backlinks and linked domains
- Gives insight into a competitor's traffic engagement tactics
- Helps you determine how strong your strategy needs to be to rank for a particular keyword.
How To Track:
To track Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) using the Mozbar Chrome extension:
- Install the Mozbar Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store.
- After installing the extension, go to the website where you want to check the DA and PA for.
- Locate the "M" icon at the top of your browser and click on it.
- The Mozbar will appear, showing you the DA, PA, and Spam Score for the website.
- To check the DA and PA for a different website, simply go to that website and repeat the process.
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are considered one of the google ranking factors by most SEO experts. It has been seen that a website that attains more quality backlinks gains a better ranking on google's search results page than one that has lesser numbers and quality. Backlinks should thus be among the indicators you're keeping an eye on and should be the focal point of your SEO strategy.
Why Important:
- Backlinks can improve a website's credibility and authority.
- Backlinks can help diversify a website's referral traffic sources.
- Targeted backlinks can bring relevant traffic to the website.
- Backlinks can improve a website's visibility and rankings in search results.
How To Track:
The Backlink analytics feature from the best SEO tools like Ahrefs or SemRush makes it simple to keep tabs on your backlink count and referring sites. You may use this tool to assess the success of your site's link-building efforts, find new backlinks, and learn when old backlinks are removed. Knowing how many fresh backlinks are pointing to your website as you evaluate your link-building strategies is useful.
You can track your backlinks report on Ahrefs using the following steps-
- Head over to the "Ahrefs site explorer" tool
- Enter and search for any URL that you want to track
- Go "backlinks" section below "backlink profile" on the left of your dashboard
Now it will display all the links your site is getting from. You can also use different filters that Ahrefs provides to measure the quality and type of backlinks of your website.
It is crucial to filter out and remove the links leading from spammy or unrelated websites using the information provided. Unnatural and spammy can hurt your website and get penalized by google in the long run.
4. Track Behavior Flow
Google Analytics has a beneficial report called behaviour flow that may assist you in understanding how visitors navigate across your website. Analyzing the paths individuals take that result in conversions helps identify potential pitfalls.
Why Important:
- It can help identify issues with website navigation and user experience.
- Identify areas of the website that are not optimized for conversions.
- Provide insights on content and keyword strategy.
- It can help identify opportunities for internal linking.
How To Track:
- In your Google Analytics account, go to Behavior > Behavior Flow in the sidebar.
- Customize the flow chart based on your desired criteria, such as landing pages, organic traffic sources, and more.
- Examine the exit pages where visitors are leaving your site without converting.
- Make any necessary changes to these pages to try to increase the conversion rate, or consider redirecting the page to another relevant and effective website.
- Continue to monitor the behaviour flow report to see the impact of your changes and identify any additional opportunities for improvement.
5. Page Speed
One of the best SEO KPIs to track, page speed is a crucial factor influencing most of the other metrics.
According to Google's new page speed industry criteria, fast websites and lower bounce rates are strongly associated. They discovered that the likelihood of someone abandoning your website increases as page loading speed grows.
According to Portent research, your site's revenue per page visit doubles when its loading time is reduced from two to one second.
A website's bounce rate will increase by almost 120 percent if it takes more than 10 seconds to load. Hence, it's very wise to optimize and improve website speed.
Why Important:
- Page speed is a ranking factor for Google
- It improves user experience.
- It Improves the crawlability of a website
- Faster page speeds can reduce server load and improve website performance
- Lower page speed affects your sales and bounce rates.
How To Track:
- Go to the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
- Enter your website's URL and run the test.
- The tool will give your website a score based on its loading speed.
- A score of 100% indicates a fast website.
- A 90% or above score is considered good but less than 100%.
- It should be improved if your score is between 50% and 90%.
- A score of 50% or lower is considered bad.
6. Conversions/Goals
Conversion rate plays an important role in SEO strategy and it affects entirely on a company’s growth. This indicator is arguably the most significant when determining the performance of your website. We cannot forget that a website is the only platform for you to showcase your services and turn potential customers into leads.
Conversion for any website could vary depending upon the goal they set as per their business.
For example, A hospitality business website may want visitors to sign up for their newsletter before leaving their website. They can email the users about their future offers and benefits and convert them into paying customers.
Similarly, you can set your conversions and track them based on your goal, like form sign-ups, sales, leads, downloads etc. The ideal way to implement this is to set your personal goals in Google Analytics and track the conversion rates
7. Keyword Rankings
Google or any other search engine generates a results page when any word or phrase is entered and searched for. While implementing an SEO strategy, you might optimize your content and website for various phrases or keywords related to the business's products and services. But it is important to know and measure the position of your website's pages and those keywords to improve your SEO rankings and traffic.
Importance Of Measuring This SEO KPI:
- Determine the keywords you're performing well for
- Discover keywords where you are weak
- Find new keywords
- Find keywords which competitors are ranking for
Given that more than 25% of users respond and engage on the first page of Google search results. Conducting a Google search for your target keywords is an easy way to monitor your position on search engine results. The other way to track your keyword rankings is by using the "keyword rank tracking" feature of various keyword research and analysis tools.
8. Organic Search Visibility
A website's organic search visibility refers to the level of prominence that a website has in search results(SERP) for keywords related to its content. If a website has higher organic visibility, it's most likely to receive more traffic, which could turn into more conversions in terms of leads, sales, etc.
Why Important:
- Tracking search visibility can indicate that your SEO strategy is effective.
- High search visibility can contribute to the development of a strong brand presence.
How To Track:
- Track organic traffic of specific pages using Google Analytics or Search Console.
- Monitor the website's ranking on relevant keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Monitor the website's performance for brand name keywords.
9. Organic CTR
The click-through rate (CTR), a performance indicator, gauges the proportion of people who click on your link to those who browse the search results. High CTR thus equals high traffic.
CTR is a significant ranking factor used by search engines. For instance, even high rankings won't help you draw in more people if your search snippets don't appear engaging enough. As a consequence, your CTR is far from satisfactory. Low CTR signifies to search engines that your website doesn't live up to user expectations, which might lead to lower ranks.
People frequently commit grave errors by ignoring this KPI to focus on traffic and rankings. First, however, you must find the right digital marketing agency to identify the cause of your high impressions not generating much traffic by monitoring your organic CTR and addressing the issue.
Importance Of Tracking CTR:
- Understand and improve meta title and description to be more click-worthy
- Improve search rankings by optimizing SEO strategy if CTR is lower
How To Track:
CTR can be measured using the following formula -
CTR = (Total number of clicks/Total impressions) x 100
10. Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic
Knowing how many people find your website through searches for your company name and related terms (branded) versus everything else (non-branded) is always useful.
If most of your customers find you by searching for your brand name on Google, you're likely missing out on many customers who are simply looking for solutions to their problems.
Importance Of Tracking Branded vs Non-Branded Traffic:
- Identify brand reputation
- Identify brand recognition
- Understand target audience
- Shows how effective your SEO strategy is
How To Track:
In Google Search Console, you can estimate the ratio of branded to non-branded traffic.
Navigate to the Performance tab. From here, you'll need to filter your report for branded searches. Then, enter your brand name and any variations/misspellings in the query field, using 'queries containing' as the operator. Click the Apply button.
When you're finished adding filters, note the 'Total Clicks' figure. This is your customized traffic figure. Then, change the operators on all of your branded term filters to 'Queries Not Containing' and make another note of the 'Total Clicks' number.
This will give you the difference in traffic between branded and non-branded traffic.
11. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of people visiting only one page on your website. Although the metric is not a ranking signal, a high bounce rate may indicate a problem with specific pages or your entire website. At the very least, it's a missed opportunity to interact with your audience.
Importance Of Tracking Bounce Rate:
- Identify and improve the under-performing section of your website
- Improve user experience
- Shows how engaging your content is
- Indicate whether the content is related to search intent or not.
Have you ever wondered how to lower your bounce rate? Finally, you must ensure that site visitors have a positive experience. There are several ways to do this:
- Check that the page matches the search intent.
- Make the page's purpose clear right away, and place important information above the fold.
- Make legitimately great content that entices users to explore your site further.
- Make the text easy to read and visually appealing.
- Things that disrupt the user experience should be avoided (pop-ups, ads, unintuitive navigation, etc.)
- Increase the page speed.
- Make use of compelling CTAs.
12. Average Session Duration
Another best SEO KPI to track and understand user behaviour once they arrive at your website is Average Session Duration. People who spend a lot of time digesting your content, clicking on other pages, and researching your products or services are likely to have a high Average Session Duration.
Importance Of tracking Average Session Duration
- Get insights on how users engage with the website
- Identify and improve weak areas of content or page
- Improve user experience
How To Track:
If your average duration is low, you most likely have a problem: your content is too short or not interesting enough to keep the users on your website. You can find this metric in the "Overview" section on the "Behaviour" column of google analytics.
13. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
CPA is one of the best KPIs in SEO to measure the effectiveness of your campaign from a financial point of view. An SEO project can have a lot of expenses, including SEO services, SEO tools, content writing, web developers, etc. CPA helps measure the cost you bear to convert per user into leads or sales with respect to your overall SEO project cost.
Importance Of Measuring CPA:
- Understand the efficiency of SEO efforts
- Identify the cost for every conversion
- Optimize keyword strategy
How To Track:
CPA in SEO can be measured using this formula -
Total Cost Of SEO Campaign/Total Conversions = Cost Per Acquisition(CPA)
14. ROI
Our world has entirely changed due to the current pandemic. Many brands guard their marketing budgets and scrutinize every dollar spent.
Calculating the ROI of SEO is the most effective SEO KPI metric to justify your existence, and it all begins with business objectives. If you are an eCommerce brand selling equipment and your goal is to grow 30% year over year, you will need a strategy that will help you achieve that goal.
It is a little complex to measure the ROI of SEO in comparison with paid advertisements. SEO can chunk up your investments for a long time until you see any results or conversions.
For example, The SEO cost of one blog for you is 400$, and in the long run, it generates sales or leads worth 1000$. Your ROI for that piece of content can be measured by subtracting the total revenue it generated from the total cost of it, i.e. 600$. Now divide the profit it made by the total cost. Now the ROI from this blog for you will be 60%.
Importance Of Measuring SEO ROI:
- Understand the effectiveness of your SEO strategy
- Make data-driven decisions
- Optimize SEO budget
- Helps in targeting services/product keywords that can generate higher ROI.
How To Track:
You can measure the ROI of an SEO project using this two-step formula-
- Total Cost Of SEO Project - Total Revenue Generated = Net Profit
- (Net Profit/Total Cost Of SEO Project) x 100 = ROI In Percentage
15. Traffic From Specific Locations & Devices
Location & device-based traffic gives you insights into your website users from any specific geolocation and the device they use to engage with, respectively. By tracking location-based KPIs in SEO, you can better identify where you attract most visitors from and understand if they align with your target audience. While knowing the type of device used to access your website will help you analyze and enhance its responsiveness to provide them with a better user experience.
Importance Of Measuring:
- Determine the area where your business is most in demand.
- Create customized content to target
- Improve local SEO efforts
- Offer a better user experience
- Helps in identifying whether your targeted marketing is working or not
- Helps in understanding the audience in your niche.
How To Track:
You can use Google Analytics to track this metric by using the following steps
For Location -
- Access your google analytics dashboard
- Go to the "Audience" section on the left
- Scroll down and find the "Geo" section
- Click on the "Location" tab under it to see the location-based user data
For Device -
- Head back to the "Audience" section in the Google Analytics dashboard
- Scroll down and open the "Benchmarking" section
- Tap on "Devices" to access the data of devices used to browse your website
Tips For Effectively Using SEO KPIs To Improve Website Organic Performance
- Identify the right goals as per your business.
- Choose and track the right KPIs
- Set a benchmark and track them regularly
- Monitor trends in results.
