What are SEO KPIs, and What KPIs are useful to track?
Are you wondering how your website is performing? Whether you are progressing toward your SEO goal or floating away from it? All these can be answered by tracking your SEO KPIs.
Let’s dive into what SEO KPIs are and what KPIs you must track for your business.
What are SEO KPIs?
SEO KPIs are the “Key Performance Indicators” in SEO that are used to determine the performance of a website or business in organic search results. You can use these measurable metrics to assess your SEO and marketing efforts and organic performance.
There are plenty of SEO KPIs that can give you deep insight into your performance; however, they may vary from business to business. Each business follows different strategies and has different goals; thus, KPIs may vary accordingly.
Why are SEO KPIs important to track?
SEO KPIs are valuable in giving you insight into your performance.
The Key Performance Indicators help you determine how well your efforts are paying back and how well your website performs organically.
SEO is an effective but slow process. The results may take up much time to appear. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to determine what’s working and what’s not, what’s worth spending time and what’s not. This is where SEO KPIs come into the picture. These KPIs give you an overall idea of how your efforts are paying off.
These KPIs are vital to track for every business as they disclose the performance and depict what strategies are working and driving success and what strategies need improvement. Additionally, KPIs can help you spot issues beforehand to avoid future mishaps.
How can we measure SEO KPIs?
Measuring SEO KPIs manually is a nearly impossible or daunting task. There are plenty of valuable SEO tools that can help you measure your SEO KPIs. However, the most effective tools you can use for your KPIs are Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and Google Analytics.
What SEO KPIs must you track for your business?
As said, KPIs change as per the business goals and efforts you make for your business growth which might pose a challenge for business or website owners regarding which KPIs to prefer and which to leave. Here, we have covered the most valuable SEO KPIs that are relevant for any kind of business. These key performance indicators can help you determine your SEO and marketing progress and plan your strategies accordingly.
1. Return On Investment (ROI)
The most valuable and important KPI to assess a website/business performance is ROI.
Every business aims to receive a profitable ROI (return on investment). The efforts, time, and money you invested in your business must return to you with profits.
Return on investment is valuable, but it takes time to measure ROI. Initially, you might not receive positive ROI; however, with the right strategy and efforts, you can get positive ROI. You can calculate the ROI % using the formula: Gained value-Invested value/Invested value*100.
2. Conversions
Another valuable KPI to measure business success is conversions- leads and sales. As ROI takes time to show results, it’s not a good option to rely solely on it.
You can easily measure business growth with organic conversions. Determine how well your business is converting and bringing sales and leads. This KPI is valuable and shows your business value and growth over time. Simply, the higher the conversions (sales or leads), the higher the business growth.
You can use the Google Analytics tool to track your conversions and business goals.
3. Search Visibility
One of the essential SEO KPIs is Search Visibility. It depicts how consistently your brand is visible on Search engine results. Search visibility or SERP visibility can show whether your organic visibility grows, declines or is consistent.
It is a metric that can tell whether a business is growing over time. This KPI can be measured using Google Search Console’s impression report. It will clearly show your website/business search visibility on Google. The more the impression, the more the organic visibility, which exhibits the brand’s growth.
You can also use SEMrush and Ahrefs to track your search visibility.
4. Search Rankings
Until your site or business can’t appear in front of your targeted audience, how can it achieve higher traffic, leads, and conversions? A business must rank higher on SERPs to appear in front of the targeted audience, and thus, search ranking is a valuable KPI for any business.
Usually, the higher results get most of the clicks. Therefore, the higher you appear on SERPs, the higher the chances of getting clicks and generating leads.
5. Organic CTR
Organic Click Through Rate (CTR) is a valuable SEO metric for websites and businesses. It is a ratio of the total number of clicks you received against the total number of people who viewed the search results. The more people click the result, the more traffic it drives to your site, resulting in higher conversion possibilities.
Poor CTR might signal search engines that your title and description are irrelevant to the searcher query, leading to a drop in your search ranking.
This KPI is often overlooked by SEOs but is highly significant in driving traffic and leads.
6. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic to your site can depict your site’s strengths and good performance. It is a valuable KPI that shows the traffic reaching the site organically. The better your SEO and marketing efforts, the higher the traffic your site will receive. Increased traffic may generate leads and conversions, thus is valuable to measure as a KPI.
7. Bounce rate
The bounce rate can be an effective KPI that displays how valuable and engaging your content is for the query it is ranking for. A bounce rate is the rate at which visitors leave your page after clicking it. The higher the bounce rate, the more you are lacking somewhere.
Track your bounce rate to determine your content’s value and optimization, and make efforts to bring it down. An increased bounce rate will back your progress and keep your site back on the right track.
8. Average Session Duration
Another important KPI to track is the “Average Session Duration.” It can be on a sitewide or page-level basis.
The sitewide average session duration is the average time visitors spend on your site, which describes how engaging and effective your website’s content is.
Similarly, the average session duration on a page is the average time spent by visitors on your particular page that displays how engaging your particular pages are. This SEO KPI metric is valuable as it helps you assess your strategies and determine whether everything is going the right way or needs modifications.
If the duration time is low, your business is lacking, and you need to improve your site’s content and usability. If your average duration is high, your business is on the right track and growing. You can see this metric using Google Analytics.
9. New and returning customers
Customers are most important for any business’s success. Thus, assessing new and returning customers’ metrics can be a valuable KPI. Customers’ behavior on a site can depict the performance and growth of a business.
You can use Google Analytics for this. It lets you separate visitors based on new and returning metrics.
Even though new customers would be high, they are merely for site discovery, thus, hard to convert. Returning customers, on the other hand, are more valuable as they tend to convert more when compared to new customers. The higher the number of returning customers, the higher the chances of more conversions and sales, and the stronger will be the business growth.
10. Quality Backlinks
Increased new quality backlinks can reflect the website/business growth.
New backlinks to your site can advocate your credibility and trustworthiness and depict your SEO and marketing efforts. The more quality backlinks you acquire over time, the stronger website growth it depicts.
11. Branded traffic VS non-branded traffic
Branded traffic is the visitors that search for products/services with your brand name. Either they know you, have been recommended by someone else, or might have seen your ads or posts on social media.
Non-branded traffic is the visitors searching for keywords/products/services related to your brand that you rank for. They didn’t know you and spotted you on the SERP for the first time.
Brand awareness is the major reason behind branded traffic. Measuring branded traffic vs. non-branded traffic as KPI is valuable as you can assess your performance. The percentage shift of non-branded traffic to branded traffic can be a positive sign of your progress. Branded traffic is likely to convert more when compared to non-branded traffic.
Track your SEO KPIs and drive performance-based results.
Key performance indicators are nothing different than measuring SEO and marketing efforts to assess business progress and success.
We have presented what SEO KPIs are, why they are important and which KPIs you must measure in the most simplified manner. Hope this write-up has helped you learn all about SEO KPIs efficiently. Ensure to provide your users with SEO-optimized, high-quality, valuable, and engaging content/products/services and invest in marketing efforts to get better returns and great success.
Good luck with SEO KPIs!