Goals and KPIs are important parts of your SEO strategy, but they are often overlooked.
Not having KPIs makes it difficult to understand how well your campaign is doing and whether the work you’re doing is effective. This makes it hard to know if you’re heading in the right direction.
SEO does not deliver results and returns quickly, but if you set KPIs (key performance indicators), you can show how your strategy is positively affecting business.
They can help you manage expectations with other stakeholders by setting some SEO KPIs. These KPIs should be based on your strategy and be a way to measure and report on success and progression.
The guide below contains information on the most important KPIs you should be monitoring.
11 SEO KPIs You Need to Track
Not sure which KPIs (key performance indicators) to track for your SEO campaign? Here are 11 essential ones to keep a close eye on, for a regular snapshot of how your campaign is progressing.
The following text provides an overview of how effective your efforts are and how to identify any potential problems early on. This allows you to show the impact you are having and avoid any future issues.
1. ROI
The main goal of an SEO strategy for most businesses is to make a profit. This can be done by investing in an in-house team or agency, as long as more money is earned than what is spent.
Tracking the return on investment for your SEO activities is crucial because it is the best measure of success. Keep in mind that it can take time to see an ROI, often six to 12 months or more.
You will be able to improve your performance if you understand where your ROI target is and measure it regularly.
You can measure the ROI, or return on investment, from your SEO efforts by looking at how much revenue is generated from the channel.
2. Conversions (Sales and Leads)
Relying on ROI alone is not the best way to measure success because it takes time to see financial returns.
If your business is selling products, then tracking organic sales is a good way to show how successful your efforts are. If your business is generating leads, then tracking organic conversions is a good way to show how successful your efforts are. Either way, increasing organic conversions is a good way to measure success.
Make sure you know the conversion benchmark before you start working on a campaign, or it will be harder to show how much your campaign has increased it.
A recommended benchmark for measuring the growth of your campaign is to take the average of conversions generated in the three months before your campaign began.
There are two ways to track conversions in Google Analytics: through measuring goals for lead conversions, and through tracking sales by channel in the ecommerce report.
3. Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic
Don’t forget to measure the percentage of non-branded traffic your site is receiving as this is a key measure of success.
Traffic that is driven by branded keywords is usually the result of someone already being familiar with the business. This could be because they have seen ads for the business on social media, read about the business in the news, or even met someone from the business in person.
This is referring to traffic that cannot be attributed to SEO activities.
Non-branded traffic is traffic from searchers who are not familiar with your business before they saw you ranked on the SERPs.
4. Organic traffic
Organic traffic consists of visits to your site that come as a result of appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs). You don’t have to pay for this traffic; it’s simply the result of your site appearing as a result of a search.
In essence, SEO is all about making your site rank for keywords related to your niche. You want your site to be visible for searches related to your business so that potential customers can find you.
However, it’s also important to look at the traffic coming from each individual keyword so that you can see which ones are driving the most traffic. You should track the amount of traffic your website gets from organic searches to evaluate your SEO strategy’s effectiveness. Individually tracking traffic from each keyword can give you insight into which keywords are bringing users to your site.
By landing page
You need to track organic traffic both sitewide and by landing page in order to get a complete picture of where your traffic is coming from and where you need to improve.
If some of your pages are ranking on the first page of Google while others are ranking on the seventh page, you should focus your SEO efforts on the latter pages.
You can also compare the rankings of different pages to see which SEO strategies work best.
By location
You should track the source of your organic traffic to see if your SEO efforts are paying off. This is especially important if you’re targeting a specific geographic location or expanding your business into new markets.
If you want to track your organic traffic by country, you should use a web analytics tool. You might be surprised to learn that you have a strong fan base overseas. If you find that you have a lot of traffic from other countries, you may want to consider expanding your business into those markets.
If you notice that a lot of your organic traffic is coming from countries that are not profitable for your business, it might be time to reconsider your SEO strategy. It is possible that you need to focus more on SEO keywords that are related to your target countries.
Even if most of your organic traffic comes from within the US, it’s possible that your product or service is more appealing to people in some states than others. The only way to know that is by tracking organic traffic by state.
If you find that people in certain states prefer your brand to others, you can invest more marketing resources into those states to improve sales. If states that are crucial to your business are underperforming, this may be a sign that you need to change your website so that it appeals more to this target demographic.
5. Breakdown of Organic Traffic from Bing and Google
Although the most popular search engine is Google, there are others that many of your customers use, such as Bing.
This is why you should look at the percentage of your traffic that comes from each of the two search engines.
If you’re not getting as much traffic from search engines as you think you should, you might need to update your SEO strategy.
6. Keywords Ranked in Google
A keyword tracking tool like SEMrush can be used to determine the number of keywords for which your site ranks in Google. This data can be used to inform your SEO strategy.
Make a list of the keywords you want to rank for that you are not currently ranking for. These are the keywords you should focus on in your SEO campaigns.
If you find that your site ranks in the top 10 for some high-converting keywords, it’s a good idea to continue using those keywords in your content marketing campaigns. Your top-ranking keywords are likely bringing you the most traffic, so make sure that the landing pages associated with those keywords are relevant to keep your bounce rate low.
7. Local visibility
If you have a physical location that customers can visit, it’s important to keep track of your local visibility.
Specifically, check if your site appears on the local 3-pack for keywords related to your niche. Also, check if it appears when people type the name of your town or city plus the name of your industry. If not, it means it’s time to work on some local SEO.
8. Click-through rate (CTR)
Google Search Console offers a Search Analytics report with a click-through rate (CTR) statistic that demonstrates how often people click on a result after seeing it in the search results. This is important to pay attention to as it not only shows how well your pages rank in the SERPs, but also how appealing the content is to people.
If people see your content and like it, they’ll click on the link. If they don’t, they’ll move on to another result.
By landing page
Focusing on CTR by landing page will help identify which pages are most successful from an SEO perspective. These are the pages that get the most clicks from the search results.
Additionally, you should analyze the pages with the lowest CTRs and improve them.
By top keywords
You should also check the CTR of your top search terms in Google Search Console. If you see that a term is getting you a lot of clicks, you should determine which pages are ranking for those keywords and ensure that your page content accurately reflects searcher intent. You might also want to test conversion optimization elements on these pages.
If you have a low CTR for a valuable search term, you should look at the page(s) optimized for that term and find out why. It might be that the title or description associated with the page isn’t relevant or enticing.
9. Pages indexed in Google Search Console
No one will be able to find your webpage if it is not indexed which is why it is important to pay attention to the number of pages on your website that have been indexed.
If pages take an unusually long time to get indexed, use the Crawl>Fetch as Google option in the Search Console.
You should also compare how many of your pages have been indexed by Google to the number of pages you have submitted. If a small percentage of your submitted pages are indexed, you might need to manually request indexing through the Search Console.
10. Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the main things Google uses to rank websites. It is unlikely that this will change anytime soon. You need to be aware of how many links your website has, both the good and the bad ones.
The link metrics that you should be measuring are:
- Total number of backlinks
- Total number of referring domains
- Number links lost
- Number of links earned
- Toxic links
Semrush’s Backlink Analytics and Backlink Audit tools can be used to track all of the above.
While individual numbers may not seem significant, they are when you compare them to your competitor’s numbers. Use a domain tool to compare your link profile to your closest competitors.
11. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is important because it tells you how engaging your content is. If people are bouncing off the page, it means they’re not finding what they’re looking for. You can use bounce rate to understand how relevant your content is to the search queries it’s ranking for.
A high bounce rate means that users are not staying on the page, which means missed opportunities to convert them into customers. Sometimes, only small changes are needed to improve the situation, but if you’re not paying attention, you might not notice the problem.
In Google Analytics, the bounce rate of your site and pages can be found under Behavior → Site Content → All Pages.
The following text discusses the benefits of having and measuring SEO KPIs as part of a marketing campaign. While every marketer has their own specific KPIs that need to be tracked, it is important to have these in place and regularly monitor how the site is performing against them. This allows for a campaign to stay focused and efficient while continually measuring its progress and success.
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