If you ask ten different SEOs what their top key performance indicators are, you will probably receive eleven different answers.
The reason is that KPIs are situational; they vary depending on the type of business.
Below are 9 KPIs that can be important for a variety of online monetization models.
KPIs don’t only show areas where a company is doing well, but can also act as a guide for areas which need improvement. They can also be metrics that highlight areas requiring improvement.
Many people improve their metrics by focusing on winning, such as increasing sales and conversions. It’s a good approach.
There are also KPIs related to failure which can be useful for identifying new areas to find success.
The purpose of this survey is to review KPIs related to success and failure, investigate shortcomings in popular KPIs, and introduce additional KPIs that may not be widely known.
1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
The customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total amount of money that a customer is expected to spend over the course of their relationship with a company. This metric takes into account the likelihood that a customer will continue to use a product or service, as well as the amount of money they are likely to spend each time they make a purchase.
This, in turn, allows the business to prioritize its SEO efforts and produce the most ROI possible. CLV can help a business identify which SEO activities will have the most ROI, so the business can prioritize its SEO efforts.
Jeff Coyle, co-founder of the MarketMuse AI-based content strategy software, believes that Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a key performance indicator that businesses should be aware of.
Jeff Coyle said this about the CLV KPI:
“My perspective on using CLV and why it connects to core KPI is because it’s a Unifying metric.
I love having a unified metric because it means that all teams have to support it.
It makes people who usually only think about one stage of the process to think about the customer first.
In order to produce relevant content, teams must consider the entire customer journey, all the different types of customers, and the various levels of expertise among them.
An SEO who focuses on a single keyword and tries to game the system may be able to get a webpage to rank every once in a while, but it’s not a sustainable or effective strategy.
However, that strategy will not help increase CLV.
A PPC person or a demand generation marketer who only supports content at the awareness stage and not further down the funnel should be willing to do so, especially for support and customer content.
They get paid on leads and conversions.
CTAs that encourage customers to buy more content will result in a higher customer lifetime value. The author is saying that companies that create a great customer experience find that their customers care more about the company’s success and growth.
Jeff believes that by focusing on customer lifetime value, all departments within the company will be motivated to improve their operations and contribute to the company’s year-over-year growth.
2. Content Efficiency
Jeff wants to share one more KPI with us, Content Efficiency.
Content efficiency is a metric that combines aspects of both SEO and company goals to create optimized content. This can be done by analyzing what content is already ranking well and improving upon it, or by looking at what content needs to be created in order to achieve desired results.
Jeff explains it like this:
“My other favorite KPI is content efficiency. It’s about the balance of how many new pieces of content you publish, versus how many existing pieces of content you update and/or optimize. The goal is to have a high rate of success for meeting goals and predicted ROI.
Typically, content teams only achieve a fraction of their goals. In fact, Success rates are often quite low, with only a tenth of content actually being effective.
My approach allows teams to operate at 40% or higher, with 40% or more of their content achieving its goals. That percentage defines good content teams.
The company with the team performing at 10% Content Efficiency is spending ten times what they think they are spending on content to achieve their goals.
How much does content cost? $400 to $500 a page? They only find 10% of the content to be meaningful.
The effective cost for a team to get one piece of content published and updated is, on average, $5,000.
The cost for a team to operate at peak Content Efficiency is around $2,500 to $3,000 to achieve their goals.
Content efficiency is a key performance indicator that helps people transition to data-driven decision making for content strategy. It helps individuals understand what to create and what to update.
It’s what we do that helps you do what you do, better. MarketMuse helps you create content that is more efficient and effective. Personalized Difficulty metrics. You know what needs to be built and how much investment is required to make an impact.
3. Average Engagement Time
I then spoke with someone who is an expert in analytics, Kayle Larkin, about KPIs.
As an Analytics and SEM consultant, Kayle has worked with B2B and ecommerce sites in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia. She is also a Content Writer for Search Engine Journal.
She explained a KPI available in Google Analytics 4 that tracks user engagement with a website. This can be difficult to accurately measure.
Kayle shared:
” Google Analytics 4 has improved our ability to see if people are actually interacting with the website or not.
Engagement time is the average length of time that a user spends on a particular website. Since the user was likely looking at it, that means it is important.
4. Conversion Goals By Percent-Based Metrics
Kayle next advised reviewing KPIs as percent-based metrics:
“The most important KPI is conversions/goals. The only thing that should matter to your company is what makes it money.
In addition to looking at raw event values, also look at goals by percent-based metrics.
The more traffic you have, the more goals you will have.
The goal conversion rate dropping could mean that the organic campaign is not as efficient as it could be.
Are you seeing a decrease in traffic but an increase in goal conversion rate? This could be because you are better focused on your target audience.
Those are the two main KPIs to measure whether an organic strategy is performing well over time.
5. Organic Traffic
First off, we have organic traffic.
The vast majority of visitors who land on a site come from unpaid sources, such as search engine results. This is organic traffic generated to the website.
The more people who organically visit your website, the greater the chance that you will get qualified leads, as more people are viewing your site. Paid traffic may provide a quick boost to your business, but organic traffic is a more sustainable solution that will improve brand loyalty and be more cost-effective in the long run.
Organic traffic data can give you insights into how well your efforts to target audiences are performing, as well as how well certain keywords are performing. If you’re seeing higher organic traffic, it could be a sign that your content is relevant to your audience and that you’re delivering the kind of content they want to read.
Here’s some advice from Jonathan Zacharias, the Founder of GR0:
’ Don’t forget that just because you have organic traffic doesn’t mean you’re necessarily making any money. It is important that organic traffic is converted into customers or potential customers.
To measure organic traffic, you have two options:
- Google Analytics.
To find your organic traffic using Google Analytics, go to the Acquisition tab, then select All Traffic. Under Source/Medium, choose Organic Traffic.
- Alternatively, you could use our free SEO reports template to measure your organic traffic easily.
After creating a Whatagraph account, connect your data sources to analyze both real-time and historical data to understand user behavior habits.
6. Conversions Coming From Organic Traffic
If a visitor goes to a client’s website from a search engine and does what was intended (e.g. buys something, signs up for a newsletter, etc.), that is considered a conversion from organic traffic.
This data can be used by marketing agencies to calculate ROI and conversion rates for specific keywords. You can improve your conversion rates by studying which keywords produce the best results and allocating your budget accordingly.
Overall, it is beneficial to write content to increase organic traffic, but it is even more advantageous if that traffic can be converted into organic conversions. You can get more conversions (sales, sign-ups, etc.) by ranking better in search engine results pages, even though conversion rates are not a factor that search engines use to rank pages.
There are 2 basic and most common keywords people use when searching on search engines:
Commercial keywords: buy or price;
Informational keywords: how or why.
To make things easier, try our performance report. This tool will allow you to see your specific progress with key performance indicators, goals completed through organic means, and the number of conversions you achieved through organic traffic.
7. New and Lost Backlinks
Backlinks that are new or that have been lost can give you an idea of which websites have recently linked to yours, as well as which links you may have lost.
A backlink is created when another website links to your client’s website.
Backlinks are important for SEO strategy and inbound marketing. Measuring new backlinks is essential to track progress and ensure that your strategies are working. If you want your client to have a high ranking on Google, you need to get them high-quality backlinks.
If a backlink is lost, it means that the link has been removed or deleted from another website. This can provide valuable information about why the link was removed and what needs to be done to avoid losing more links in the future.
Measuring the number of lost backlinks is important for your SEO strategy because many lost backlinks can negatively impact the performance of the page to which those links were directed. It could also indicate that someone is trying to harm your website’s ranking on search engines, so keep an eye on this metric.
Whatagraph can generate a backlink report in less than 2 minutes, making it easy to track KPIs.
8. Keyword Rankings
The position of a client’s page on the search results page for a specific keyword search is another important SEO KPI.
An SEO ranking is a number that indicates where a particular site appears in search engine results. This key performance indicator provides useful insights into the progress of your current rankings or ability to rank for new keywords. A general metric to show your content marketing success and overall performance in search rankings is _____________.
And there is more.
This KPI will give you detailed information about how your keywords and related pages are doing in Google search results. If you have a higher ranking in search engine results pages, you can expect to get more traffic. it is essential to track this marketing metric as a small increase in keyword ranking can have a big impact on your revenue
If you’re unsure of how to track SEO rankings, don’t worry!
A simple way to track keyword rankings is to use a tool like SEMRush in conjunction with Whatagraph. Use the Keyword Rank Checker to see which keywords your website is ranking for in search engines.
9. Bounce Rate
The fifth key performance indicator is the bounce rate.
The bounce rate in SEO is the percentage of people who come to your client’s site and then leave without taking any action.
Agencies that specialize in digital marketing need to keep an eye on this key performance indicator. By doing so, they can identify and correct issues with a website, like responsively design or a lack of certain types of content. A high bounce rate means that people are leaving your website without taking any desired actions, which hurts your marketing strategy. Reducing your bounce rate should be your top priority.
Moreover, tracking your bounce rate does the following:
- Helps to see how users engage with client’s pages on the site;
- Identifies data sources from which users come;
- Identifies the data sources with the lowest and highest bounce rates;
- Provides enough data to base optimization and marketing decisions;
- Highlights funnel flaws that need to be addressed.
The GA4 reporting tool for agencies allows you to track your bounce rate so you can improve your website’s performance. Our tool can help you see the patterns in your bounce rate and give you a dashboard that shows all your key metrics at a glance.
10. Page Load Speed
Technical SEO is focused on making sure that a website meets the technical standards that search engines are looking for. Furthermore, technical SEO analysis helps improve organic rankings.
One of those benchmarks is page loading time.
Page load speed is a KPI that tells you how long it takes for your server to process a request and for the page to render.
A couple of things to keep in mind in regards to page speed:
- By not optimizing website speed, you harm your rankings. Google favors websites that load quickly because they provide a better user experience and as a consequence, better search visibility.
- Take into account the web hosting services you are currently utilizing. Perhaps a company exists that offers a faster-loading, better-optimized website.
- To ensure that your average page load times for desktop and mobile devices are reasonable, you should monitor this KPI. No more than two seconds should pass during the ideal load.
→ page timings You can track page load time by creating a Google Analytics account and navigating to your view. Then, go to reports, behavior, site speed, and page timings.
11. CTR
This metric is a way of measuring the number of clicks on search engine results.
The main factors that affect an organic click-through rate are:
- Ranking position;
- Title tag;
- Description;
- URL.
CTR tracking is used to measure user engagement and learn more about your customers. This measurement tells you what topics your audience is interested in, what pages they visit most often, and what problems they are having.
This KPI will help you see if your ad copy is eye-catching enough to make people want to click on it. There is sometimes a need to change the copy, the visual, or the offer.
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