10 KPIs to track your SEO performance and drive better results (+ four bonus ones!)
Tracking performance is part and parcel of everyday life for an SEO. By tracking the right metrics, your reports can accurately show whether a strategy is flailing or sailing, spot-check results – and even help you spot crucial opportunities for website performance.
But metrics aren’t enough. That’s where KPIs for SEO reporting come in. These Key Performance Indicators are a handy control factor that helps you understand – and identify – what’s working about your SEO campaign, and what isn’t. In this guide, we’ll touch on the best KPIs to watch, so you know exactly what you’re looking for when reporting week rolls around.
Please note that the majority of these KPIs require Google Search Console.
Visibility, keyword and traffic KPIs
Search visibility
This metric shows how often your domain is pulled through in search results for the keywords it ranks for. In a nutshell, it’s all about how easily people can find your brand when searching for linked terms – but considers wider rankings and the complete number of impressions. By tracking search visibility, you can see positive changes before people even start visiting your website, making it easy to monitor how effective a website optimisation is early on.
Organic traffic
Organic traffic is a key performance indicator that focuses on the number of visitors coming to your website – showing how well your SEO efforts drive interest from organic search results.
As such, it’s one of the most important KPIs to track. Why? Poor organic traffic means that you are struggling to achieve what all SEO sets out to do: grow the number of people picking and clicking your website.
Keyword rankings
As the name suggests, keyword tracking for important terms is crucial in seeing whether your SEO strategy is actively moving you up the rankings.
It’s also key to see whether you’re continually ranking for the right keywords. Namely, ones that are relevant to your website, service, and users – or else these metrics are quickly made redundant.
You can monitor how your search positions for the target keywords are changing with tools such as Ahrefs. It only takes a few clicks to start tracking: just enter your domain, select the type of SERP (organic results), and import those keywords.
Engagement and user-experience
Organic click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is all about measuring the ratio of clicks on your link to the total number of users who viewed the search results. This is a huge signal for search engine rankings, as a low CTR tells Google that your website is failing your users and they simply aren’t interested.
Compared to traffic and rankings, many people forget about organic CTR. This is a shame, as CTR as a KPI gives you the power to understand why high impressions might not translate into traffic – so you can go in and fix the issue.
Average engagement time
The average engagement time shows how long a user stays on your website after clicking on it from an organic search. The longer people spend on your website, the bigger the indication that users find your content interesting and useful. It’s a win-win.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. When your bounce rate is high, the content on your website might not be relevant to users’ search queries – or there are other issues with UX. Keeping bounce rates low is one of the best ways to keep your users happy and keep those clicks coming.
Pages per session
Pages per session is another metric that calculates the average number of pages that users are viewing on your website during a single visit. Again, a higher number of pages per session shows that users are finding your website content engaging.
Conversion-led KPIs
Organic conversions
Here, you can understand how many visitors from organic search are doing the things you’d like them to do – often directed in CTAs. This includes subscribing to newsletters or adding things to a basket. Poor conversions = poor revenue, so sharpening up your website’s UX design to ensure CTAs don’t get lost or polishing up your copy can work wonders here.
Return on investment (ROI)
Again, this is another metric that shows how financially profitable your SEO efforts are. Return on investment is subject to change, as you can measure and obtain metrics across all your marketing campaigns – but for SEO, it usually focuses on whether the net income is worth the money you spent optimising your website.
Backlinks
Although many tools don’t track backlinks, they are an important ranking factor. That’s because your SEO authority can be measured by monitoring the number and quality of backlinks to your site. Backlinks show authority, so improving the number of top-level ones that are pointing directly to your website shows Google that your content is useful and relevant.
4 Bonus KPIs!
And if you’ve checked all that, and you want even more, then have a look at these 4 bonus KPIs:
Page speed
Page speed is part of your core web vitals, and can feed into user satisfaction and overall experience. A slow-loading page is enough to ruin the experience and leave your user feeling frustrated and impatient when on your site. Not only will this lead them to click off (increasing bounce rates), but they could seek business elsewhere from competitors, and leave them with a negative impression of your brand.
Indexed pages
Part of technical SEO, checking your indexed pages lets you see whether any of your pages have been missed by the search bot’s crawling and indexing process. If so, then this could be effecting your performance as key pages on your site are not appearing in response to a user’s search query.
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
By tracking this, you can find out how much it costs for you to get an acquisition (click, sale, lead, etc.,). From this, you can determine which marketing efforts are the most effective and aren’t burning holes in your budget.
Domain authority
Domain authority (DA) is a particular metric where you get a score based on how strong your SEO efforts are and how likely you are to appear in the Google SERP. Your DA score indirectly tells you about other performance factors, such as backlink profile. For example, if your score is high, then you’re likely to have very strong backlinks.
How to decide which KPIs to track
So, how do you decide what to track? Well, that really depends on your goals and how your site currently stands. There are a lot of KPIs you can choose from, so it’s worth pinpointing a particular focus.
For example, you may want to put your efforts into technical SEO, so tracking your core web vitals like page speed will come in handy. Or, you might be wanting to gain more business, so it’s best to track things like conversion rate, and return on investment (ROI). OR, you’re looking to gain more traffic, so tracking visibility and keyword ranking should become your focus.
As you can see, there are lots to choose from, so no wonder it can feel overwhelming! Setting your business intentions and analysing your site as it is right now is the first step to pinpointing which KPIs to track.
KPIs will help you see the way
By tracking these KPIs, you can gain valuable insights into how well your SEO strategy is performing. With these performance indicators, you can spot areas for improvement and make informed data-driven decisions to help you achieve your long-term SEO goals.
Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, so make sure you keep monitoring, analysing, and pivoting your strategy for continued success!
Need some guidance on supplementing your existing SEO plans? Or need someone to come up with a tailor-made strategy for your business? Our experts can help.
