Most companies tend to rely greatly on data to make decisions. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide reliable data for businesses to track their growth. Without KPIs, you will be unable to track your campaign’s progress. We have put together the top 10 SEO KPIs to track traffic growth.
What are SEO KPIs?
SEO Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that allow online marketers to measure a site’s SEO performance in search engines. They basically show you the success of your optimization strategy. In addition, KPIs provide a learning environment where you can continuously measure and optimize your growth.
Why are KPIs important for SEO?
Like other initiatives where you invest your time, money, and resources, measuring your SEO KPIs can help improve your digital marketing efforts.
Apart from growth and providing a means to measure your progress, tracking SEO KPIs can:
- Alert you in case of any problems on your site and show the working strategies so you can apply them throughout the site. This way, you can track and measure your progress against set goals.
- Provide accountability by clearly pointing to the metrics, dimensions, and reports behind your business’s growth.
- Help you track your return on investment (ROI) for better profits. With a better ROI understanding, you can also estimate the payback period for your SEO business.
- Help you meet your audience’s needs efficiently.
- Make intelligent decisions that bring more profit.
Top 10 Important SEO KPIs to Track
1. Return on Investment (ROI)
Regardless of your current business challenges or the business model, you want your business to bring in returns.
Return-on-investment is basically the ratio between the profits you have made and the money you have spent. A high ROI thereby means higher profits, and a low ROI means lower profits in relation to the amount spent.
Measuring and tracking ROI from your SEO activities is key because it is the best measure of success. Importantly, know your ROI target and measure your performance against it, understanding and reporting on how it is improving.
The amazing thing is that several SEO tools, such as the google analytics account, simplify ROI calculation as you track your goals.
That said, it is necessary to remember that it can take time to see your ROI. Often it takes between 6 to 12 months, so try to set a reasonable ROI goal for your business.
2. Organic Visibility
Seeing that it takes time to see financial returns from SEO, another major KPI you can measure and track to see your consistency in terms of growth is organic visibility.
Organic visibility is a metric designed to help you quickly summarise your organic ranking performance. Typically, it provides the impressions of your content’s growth as rated by the Google Search Console. Based on this, you can identify the searches that bring in more organic traffic over time.
The good bit is that you can measure and report the visibility in two ways. First, you can showcase growth in impressions from Google Search Console. This is the ideal method to show continued growth, seeing that impressions show your website’s searches even if they were not indicated in clicks.
Another way to measure and report visibility is by looking at keyword trends. Using the organic research tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, you can track how your visibility is changing for important keywords.
3. Site Speed
Site speed is another important KPI you should track and measure for several reasons. First off, the site’s speed affects your usability since potential clients are likely to abandon slow-loading sites.
The site’s page also affects your website’s conversion rate. For instance, if clients want to make a purchase through the site and it takes long to load, they plausibly leave your site.
Finally, page speed impacts your SEO rankings since slow-loading sites are likely to have low rankings in the search engine results. This leads to fewer visits and views, meaning fewer returns.
4. Organic click-through rate
The click-through rate (CTR) from organic search is another important metric to track. The click-through rate is an SEO KPI that shows the percentage of people clicking on your link when searching for a specific term. Basically, CTR will show how often the number of searchers convert into website visitors.
A high CTR shows that your site is relevant to the searcher’s query, and your search snippets are effective. It also shows how well your SEO title and your metadata attract searchers for a search term. The click-through rate highly depends on the rankings of your content on a search engine.
So if your CTR is rising, it’s a great sign that clients enjoy and want to engage with content. It is also a sign that your SEO rankings are improving.
In addition, you can track your CTR using Google Analytics at the search engine query and page levels to have a more accurate scope of effectiveness on money spent.
5. Domain Authority
Domain authority is an important SEO KPI that can be used to gauge the strength of your site’s backlink profile. The backlink profile is the number and quality of the links pointing to your site from other websites.
This metric is one of the many KPIs that can be tracked to measure the health of a site’s SEO. The higher the number and quality of the links, the higher your site’s domain authority.
However, it is important to know that your domain authority is not just affiliated with backlinks you buy but can also be based on your website’s age, traffic, and trustworthiness.
6. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the number of visitors or clients who leave your website after viewing one page or leave without interacting with it. For example, if a potential client clicks on your site and only views 1 page, it will boost your bounce rate and decrease your visibility. However, if they view more than the first page, it will decrease the bounce rate – a low bounce rate means customers are engaging with your content for longer, hence boosting your visibility.
Depending on what your page is about, the average bounce rate can range between 20% and 80%. Any percentage above 80% shows that you need to optimize landing pages, create high-quality content, and improve your site’s page speeds to retain users for a longer time and reduce the bounce rate.
7. Conversion Rates For Sales and Leads
Conversion rates refer to the number of new leads you have obtained on your site compared to the site visitors. This metric helps by showing the number of visitors that are converted to customers or leads on your site. The higher the number of visitors that complete a goal (e.g buy something, fill in a form, contact you), the more profit you are likely to make in the long-term.
Nevertheless, not every visitor will convert, so you can not expect to have conversion rates of 100%. It will help if you know the average conversion rate of your site to measure how your site’s landing pages and content are performing.
You can easily calculate your site’s conversion rate percentage by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors. The best way to measure and track your site’s conversion rate is by using Google Analytics.
Suppose you notice that your site has a lower conversion rate, try to increase it by optimizing your site for conversions, using effective marketing strategies to drive more traffic, and A/B testing different elements on your site to see what works best.
8. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that measures and tracks how much your business can plan to earn from an average customer throughout the relationship. In addition, it gauges the financial value each customer brings to your site over an extended period of time.
By measuring your client’s feedback at all key touchpoints and understanding the customer experience, you will know the key drivers of CLV.
This KPI helps you identify the SEO activities that bring the greatest positive financial impact. It also redirects SEO efforts towards customer-centered strategies that maximize the value your customer gets from different types of content on your site. In most cases, it focuses on extending beyond the current clients to incorporate potential clients for future growth.
9. Keyword Rankings
Keyword ranking is another valuable SEO KPI that you need in order to track your growth. Basically, Keywords are the words or phrases potential clients use when searching for something on the internet.
Using the right keywords in your content will help to increase your site’s traffic and improve your SEO efforts. Keyword optimization is fundamental for any good SEO strategy to guarantee higher rankings and increased profits.
You can track your organic keyword rankings by using the best SEO tools. One of the tools you can use is the Google Search Console. The amazing thing about this SEO tool is that it allows marketers to monitor their website performance on Google without asking for money.
Depending on your site’s niche, you can focus on tracking high-volume keywords, product keywords, branded keywords, and your most important keywords (popularly known as money keywords in SEO circles).
The high-volume keywords usually have a higher potential since they tend to drive more traffic to your site. However, these phrases tend to be more competitive and, as a result, are difficult to rank for.
The product keywords will help you see how well your products or services rank in the search engines. Branded keywords will help you see if your brand is popular in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Your “money keywords” will show you where you are ranking in the SERPs on the most important phrases that actually make you money. This might not be product or service keywords. Sometimes, these are keywords that are just directly related to your product keywords.
10. Branded and non-branded traffic
Branded traffic is driven by users who have previously visited your site and are specifically searching for your brand using their keywords. For instance, they might search for your company name, product name, service name, or anything else from your brand.
On the other hand, non-branded traffic is driven by unfamiliar visitors who have never heard about your brand before. These users are searching with keywords that do not directly relate to your company or brand, but they may end up on your site.
Typically the non-branded traffic is the organic search traffic you want to keep growing, as this will grow your branded traffic eventually. By having branded and non-branded traffic, you can evaluate which of the two is driving more traffic to your site.
Tips on choosing SEO metrics and KPIs to track
There are several SEO KPIs you can use to help you to keep your SEO efforts focused and continually measure your campaign performance. You only need to identify and pick the most important metrics that align with your site.
However, it is tricky to know what to measure and what not. So here are a few tips to help you stay on the right track:
- Choose quantifiable KPIs that will align with your brand’s goals. These will mostly be sales or leads.
- Use leading indicators and industry statistics to show which direction the economy is headed. These will help you focus on the KPI metrics that move the niddle.
- Avoid tracking things that can’t impact your business. If you can not change it, there is no need to measure or track it.
- Create KPI time frames to be able to see if you reach your set goals against set time.
- Find a direct connection between the SEO KPIs and your business goal since different niches or businesses require different KPIs.
- Choose an easily achievable SEO KPI while still finding the right balance between measuring and tracking everything.
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