One of the most essential but overlooked parts of an SEO strategy is KPI. SEO takes time to deliver results and setting up KPIs helps you effectively track the progress of your campaign. With the help of KPIs, you will be able to better understand how your strategy is affecting your business. It also helps to have an idea about search engine performance metrics.
There are many KPIs available that can tell you more about the success of your SEO. Here are some of the KPIs that help understand the important SEO metrics of your online business. You will also get an idea of how to measure SEO performance.
ROI
The ultimate goal of any SEO strategy in a business is to drive a return on investment. This means that you need to earn more money than you spend on the investment. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that it might take time to see an ROI in any business.
So, keep a proper ROI target period. Be it six or twelve months, measure your performance regularly. Make a report of your growth to have a comprehensive understanding of the effects of the SEO strategy.
Conversions (Sales and Leads)
Organic conversions like sales and leads are another solid way to demonstrate the success of your SEO campaign. You should be aware of the conversion benchmark before the campaign to be able to compare and showcase the increase in conversions after running the campaign. One way you can do this is by taking an average of conversions generated in the three months before you started the campaign. The average can be used as a benchmark to measure growth. Tools like Google Analytics can be used to track your conversions.
Organic Visibility
Organic visibility is another reliable KPI that you can track and measure to show consistent growth. There are two ways to show organic visibility. One is two showcase growth in impressions from Google Search Console. These impressions show the searches that your site was visible for, even if they didn’t result in clicks. It is a good way to show continued growth in visibility. You can also use organic research tools to see how your visibility has changed for indexed keywords. Also, Read: SEO vs PPC: What is Right for your Business
Organic Sessions
An increase in organic sessions or traffic can help you show improvement in SEO ROI. It is the visitors that land on your website as a result of unpaid (“organic”) search results. One of the key KPIs that show impact after your strategy has taken effect is organic sessions. It is very easy to measure organic google sessions in Google Analytics. But for tracking SEO KPIs, it is better to focus on data from Google Search Console because it allows you to exclude brand searches and view organic clicks for non-branded terms in isolation.
Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic
Branded traffic is mostly driven by people who are aware of your business. They might have directly come in contact with you or your ads or somebody must have recommended you to them. Non-branded traffic, on the other hand, comes from people who have no direct knowledge of you but reach your page or business by searching for keywords related to your products and services. Measuring this split of branded vs non-branded traffic can help you understand the impact of your SEO strategy. You can analyze the true impact of your efforts on organic traffic by understanding the increase in non-branded traffic.
Keyword Rankings
Your page’s spot on the search result page for a query is known as your keyword ranking. Most search engine users end up clicking results that are seen on their first page. This is why it is important to keep a track of your website’s keyword ranking. One thing you need to note is that some keywords are seasonal in their traffic. Knowing the ranking shows you whether your efforts are working even if there is no traffic. If you know how to measure keyword performance, it will be easier to include them in your strategy and improve rankings. Also, Read: Why SEO is So Important for a Website
Backlinks
Backlinks – also known as inbound links or incoming links are links that take you from one website to a page on another website. They are one of Google’s top-ranking KPIs to track SEO growth. You should be aware of the health of your link profile, new links you are earning, as well as toxic links that appear. You should keep track of the total number of backlinks, referring domains, links lost and earned, and toxic links. Without context, these numbers don’t always mean much, which means that you need to compare your link profile to your competitors to understand them better.
Organic CTR
CTR shows the percentage of people who click on your page after their search triggers an impression. The higher the CTR, the higher the traffic you are driving to your pages. You should track your CTR at both page-level and query-level. Keeping a record of your organic CTR will help you determine the relevance of your title tag and meta descriptions concerning a given query.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing your landing page is called the bounce rate. Your bounce rate will tell you if your content is engaging enough to make them explore your website and avail your services.
A high bounce rate means that the page is not capturing the attention of visitors, which is a missed opportunity to turn traffic into conversions. Often small changes can bring significant changes in your bounce rate, but you might miss on the opportunities if you don’t regularly track your bounce rates. Also, Read: Who Needs SEO Services
Average Time on Page
Google Analytics can help you track the average time a user spends on your page. The longer it is, the more engaged they are. This means there is a higher chance to turn your traffic into conversions. You need to measure the average time users spend on your site both sitewide and a page level basis to truly understand how engaging your page is. When you see low durations, you can think about ways to increase them.
Coverage Issues
Coverage issues usually include 5xx server errors, 4xx errors, Crawl anomalies, Noindex pages, crawled—currently not indexed, discovered—currently not indexed, duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical, and blocked by robots.txt, etc. One way to analyze the coverage issues that your site is suffering from is to make use of Google Search Console. These errors can be hinting at other wide crawling or indexation problems. Tracking these issues regularly can help you stay on top of things and keep errors to a minimum.
Page Speed
The speed of your site plays an important role in your search rankings, traffic, and conversions. The most important thing that you should always keep in mind about page speed is that its metrics can keep changing for several reasons. It is not enough to optimize your site’s page speed score in the beginning and leave it at that. You need to keep close attention to it and check regularly. One way to do this is to run weekly crawls that can show you which pages have become slow. You can then look into the site performance report and make necessary changes.
To Sum it Up
There is no clear-cut answer on how to measure SEO success. Keeping a tab on your SEO KPIs can help you measure the performance of your campaign and make timely changes for optimized output. Cyfer is a top SEO agency in Kerala that can help you run your campaigns successfully. To know more, contact us now!
