SEO is a data-driven phenomenon. As SEO professionals and stakeholders of a business need to understand how their efforts are affecting the traffic on a site, SEO’s KPI proves to be valuable for them.
If you’re an SEO professional or a stakeholder, it will be beneficial for you to know which KPIs are most relevant to your business. KPIs are key performance measures that have a huge impact on your SEO strategy. These are metrics that help you measure the performance of your SEO efforts.
If SEO KPIs are not defined, monitored, and analyzed, it is like blindly following the SEO without knowing where it is taking you. They help businesses understand how well their website is performing in the search engines and identify areas for improvement.
KPIs help to set and manage expectations for SEO efforts in relation to a website. By setting the KPIs, business owners and key stakeholders can assess the performance of the SEO efforts and their impact. Every business is different, and hence, it will need its own set of KPIs to track. Here are some essential KPIs every marketer should track:
1. Conversions
Businesses invest in marketing campaigns to gain more customers. Organic conversion is the most important SEO KPI. It is also the most straightforward way to show the success of the SEO campaigns. It basically tracks the number of visitors successfully converted to the next stage, such as buying a subscription, turning into leads, and so on. It also tells you if your SEO campaigns resonate with the targeted audience.
How to track organic conversions?
The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a subscription. It is a good measure of the effectiveness of your website’s content and design. It is also more reliable as a KPI because it is not affected by changes in algorithms. Before you begin working on SEO campaigns, it is important to note your conversion benchmark against which performance will be measured. It is important to know the conversion rate as a percentage of your organic traffic. It is easy to measure your conversion rate using a simple formula.
Conversion rate = (no. of conversions / total no. of visitors) * 100%
For instance, if there were 100,000 visitors to your site and 5,000 conversions out of them, the conversion rate would be 5 percent.
More SEO professionals are using advanced analytics and attribution models to accurately measure organic conversions. For instance, as people are using different devices to access websites, it has become an essential tool for tracking conversions across different devices and channels.
Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that can help you monitor and analyze your website traffic. You can use it to track your conversion rate for organic traffic.
For this, you need to set up Google Analytics on your website and define your goals. Goals are specific actions you want your visitors to take, such as buying a product, subscribing to a list, and so on. You need to assign a value to each goal to measure the revenue generated by your conversions.
2. Cost per acquisition (CPA)
Cost per acquisition is a metric that measures the cost of acquiring one converted user. It is an important KPI to measure the success of your SEO campaigns. Understanding your CPA will help you how many new customers are costing you and determine if you need to modify your strategy.
The cost of SEO may include several things, such as team salaries, agency costs, and SEO tools. CPI is a better way to measure the success of your SEO campaigns because it can shed light on potential inefficiencies in converting new customers.
How to track CPA?
A high CPA may indicate that you are spending money on content that targets the wrong keywords or does not address a relevant user base. CPA can be calculated with the given formula.
CPA = Total marketing spend / Number of new customers acquired
It is important to keep in mind that SEO efforts and campaigns take some time to have a noticeable impact. Like any other SEO KPI, it will be better to track and monitor CPA over a period of time than look at any solitary metric.
3. Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on investment (ROI) is a key performance indicator that measures the financial benefit of your investment in SEO.
Every SEO strategy is aimed at attaining a positive ROI. It helps you confirm whether all the time and resources spent on content, site maintenance, outreach campaigns, and other SEO-related activities have been worth it or not.
However, it is difficult to measure ROI for SEO. Investment in SEO is strategic; it may take weeks, months, and even years to get a visible return on investment. ROI can be calculated by dividing the revenue generated from SEO efforts by the cost of those efforts.
The formula for calculating SEO ROI is:
ROI = (revenue earned from SEO minus cost of investment in SEO) / cost of investment in SEO
For instance, if you outsourced content writing services for $500, then you also spent a few hours of your own time editing, uploading, and publishing the content, which will amount to $300 worth of work. Your total investment in content is $800. If you calculate your ROI as soon as you publish it, your ROI will be negative as it hasn’t made any money yet. But if you calculate it after six months by giving it a chance to drive traffic and conversions, you may find your content drove $1,200 worth of conversions.
How to calculate ROI?
For calculating ROI, you need to subtract the initial cost of the investment from the total revenue generated.
For instance, in the above example, the initial cost of investment was $800, and the total revenue generated was $1200, leaving you with $400 in net profits. Then, divide it by the initial cost of the investment ($800). This would give you a 50.0% ROI.
4. Organic Visibility
Organic visibility helps you know how visible your brand is in organic searches. It is also often regarded as search visibility. There are many advantages to tracking organic visibility as a key performance indicator of your SEO efforts. First, it helps to identify keywords that drive traffic to your website. This information can be used to focus your SEO efforts on important keywords. It also helps you track your progress over time, so you can see if your SEO efforts are paying off.
Conventionally, organic visibility used to be measured against a standard search engine results page (SERP) of 10 blue links. However, SERPs are much more complex and dynamic in current times. Organic visibility must account not just for the 10 blue links but also the knowledge panel, local packs, featured snippets, and a growing number of other SERP features.
How to calculate organic visibility?
There are numerous ways to calculate organic visibility as an SEO KPI. Growth in organic impressions and visibility should foster an increase in organic sessions. This is where you start to see the real impact of your SEO strategy. When there are more organic impressions, it will lead to increased organic traffic and eventually conversions. Thus, in turn, this will have a positive impact and improve your SEO ROI.
You can use tools like ESL Rank Pro to recognize keywords and pages that are bringing in more organic traffic. It will help you see how your website and each URL are performing in Google search results, tracking their positions for all or selected targeted keywords.
The best method to track organic visibility for your website will depend on your particular needs and requirements. If you are just looking for a free tool, ESL Ranks Pro is a good option to recognize keywords and pages bringing organic traffic to your site.
5. Google Business Profile Metrics
Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) is a free Google tool used for managing the presence of a business across Google. If you are a local business or your business wants to target local customers, you should leverage the benefits of a Google Business profile.
Once you set up your Google Business profile, you will find several metrics tracked by default within the platform, such as searches, views, clicks, direction requests, and calls.
Some of the most important GBO metrics for SEO are
• Local organic traffic: It measures the number of visitors who come to your site from Google searches or Google Maps. It will help you to know how visible your business is in the search results for local searches.
• Views: It will help you to know how many times your business listing has been viewed on Google Search or Google Maps.
• Clicks: It provides a date related to the number of times people have clicked on your business listing on Google Search or Google Maps.
• Direction requests: It provides data related to the number of times people have requested directions to your business on Google Maps.
• Calls: The number of times people have called your business from your Google Business Profile listing.
• Website clicks: the number of times people have clicked on the link to your website on your Google Business Profile listing.
• Reviews: The number of reviews received by your business on Google Maps
• Rating: The average rating that your business has received on Google Maps
By tracking these metrics, you will get a better understanding of how your GBP is performing and what strategies are needed to improve your local SEO.
How to track GBP?
There are a few ways to track GBP metrics. You can track some GBP metrics directly in your Google Business Profile (GBP) dashboard. It will help you see the number of views, clicks, and directions requests your listing has received.
Google Search Console is a free tool that provides data on a website’s performance in Google search results. It can also be used to track some GBP metrics, such as local organic traffic and website clicks. There are also other tools like ESL Ranks Pro that help you track other important metrics, such as keyword rankings and backlinks.
6. Content efficiency
Content efficiency is another fascinating metric, as it is not just about creating content but also measuring its efficiency in achieving the desired goals. Content efficiency is related to optimizing content not just for search engines but also for making it engaging and user-friendly.
In order to gauge content efficiency, you may have to take several things into consideration, such as how many pieces of content were published, how many items you updated and/or optimized, and how many of those pieces were published.
When content efficiency is taken as a KPI, it aims to improve content strategy and employ data-driven decision-making for formulating strategies related to what to create and what to optimize. It helps people make data-driven decisions related to content strategy as well as improve it to know what to build and how much you need to invest to make an impact.
How to calculate content efficiency?
In order to calculate content efficiency, first of all, you need to define your content goals and track the following metrics:
• The number of pages that you publish or update
• The number of pages that meet your goals
These metrics can be easily tracked using a variety of tools, such as Google Analytics or a content management system (CMS).
Once you have tracked these metrics, you can calculate content efficiency by dividing the number of pages that meet your goals by the total number of pages that you publish or update.
By tracking content efficiency, you can identify which content is performing well, which content needs improvement, and what kind of improvements need to be implemented. Such information can be valuable to optimize your content marketing strategy and improve your SEO results.
7. Organic click-through rate
The click-through rate is the measure of how many people clicked in relation to your search visibility. For instance, if 10 people see your page in search results, it will be counted as your search visibility. Now if 2 out of those 10 people clicked the page, then (3/10) x 100, i.e., 20%, is the click-through rate.
This data helps you know if your pages are driving clicks or not. If the search visibility is high with lower click-through rates, then you need to put more effort into optimization.
Organic impressions: Organic traffic can help you compute the organic click-through rate. In other words, the organic click-through rate is the percentage of organic impressions that result in a click on your website. This KPI measures how often users choose your website over competing websites in the SERPs.
When you have a higher organic CTR, it demonstrates that your headline and snippet preview are well positioned and are effective at driving clicks. On the other hand, a lower organic CTR indicates that your content or your headline should be tweaked to better address the true intent of a given keyword. It is advised to look at the headlines of top-ranked results to improve organic CTR. You must also ensure that your title is the appropriate length.
8: User engagement data
User engagement data is a set of metrics that measure how users interact with a website or app. They can be valuable in evaluating the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and identifying areas that need improvement.
For calculating user engagement, it is recommended to track SEO KPIs like page speed, crawl errors, and coverage issues to ensure that your visitors are able to interact with your website as intended. Here are some important metrics to be measured to get user engagement data:
Bounce rate: It is the percentage of visitors who land on a website and leave it after viewing only one page. They don’t click anything else or visit the second page on the site. A high bounce rate may indicate that the content on your site is not engaging or relevant to the visitors.
In order to calculate the bounce rate, divide the number of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page by the total number of visitors. In other words, in order to get bounce rate, you need to divide the number of single page sessions by total number of sessions.
Bounce rate = (total number of one-page visit/ Total number of sessions)
9. Backlinks
Backlinks are links that go from one website to a page on another using anchor text. They are also regarded as backlinks or inbound links. They are viewed as votes of recommendations by search engines. In other words, these links demonstrate authority, quality, and relevance of a web page to the search engines, and hence they are important key performance indicators in measuring the success of an SEO strategy.
A good starting point for measuring link authority is the number of backlinks it gets.
In order to determine backlink quality, one has to find out its relevance, domain rating, and link placement.
It is crucial to track the health of your backlink profile in comparison to that of your competitors. It is recommended to look for the following backlink metrics:
• Total number of backlinks
• The number of referring domains
• The number of links earned
• The number of links lost
In order to ensure you are building a quality link profile, you can use backlink analysis tools such as ESL Ranks Pro.
ESL Ranks Pro is a rank tracking tool that also help you see how many backlinks are live for the current month, which you can use to assess if there are broken links and strategize your priorities for fixing those.
10. Keyword rankings
Keyword ranking is the first and foremost requirement of any successful SEO strategy. SEO professionals should monitor the total number of ranking keywords, the average position, and the rankings of their main competitors. One should also keep an eye on the keyword difficulty of the ranked keywords, as it will provide insight into how much time it will take to improve your rankings.
It works as an SEO KPI as it provides insight into which keywords are driving your traffic and why.
It is an important metric for SEO because it can help measure the effectiveness of SEO efforts and identify areas where improvement is needed.
How to track keyword ranking?
There are various ways to calculate keyword ranking. Google Search Console is a free tool to calculate keyword rankings. It will show you the ranking of your website for a specific keyword in the search results.
In the past, most businesses used to track a handful of keywords and formulate strategies around them. As SEO evolved, there was the emergence of semantic search, and a single piece of content can rank for thousands of keywords. Thus, it is important to stay updated on the keywords you rank well for as well as the ones you don’t. RanksPro.io is an easy-to-use and free tool to analyze your keywords.
The specific KPIs that you choose will depend on your individual business goals and circumstances. However, by considering the factors above, you can choose KPIs that will help you track the success of your SEO efforts and make informed decisions about your strategy.
Choosing the right SEO KPIs to measure your SEO performance
Selecting the right SEO KPIs is essential to determining the success of your SEO efforts and making informed decisions about your strategy. Here are some factors to be considered when choosing SEO KPIs:
Your business goals
What are your goals in relation to your SEO efforts? Are you looking to increase traffic, generate leads, or boost brand awareness? Your SEO KPIs should align with your business goals.
Your target audience
Determine your targeted audience and their needs and interests. Your KPIs should be relevant to your target audience.
Your industry
Different businesses may need SEO for different purposes. For determining the relevant SEO KPIs, it is good to consider important SEO factors for your industry. They should reflect the specific challenges and opportunities of your industry.
Your budget and resources
• What is your budget for investing in SEO? Your goals should be relevant, realistic, and achievable within your budget and resources.
Here are some additional tips for choosing SEO KPIs:
- It is recommended to begin with a small number of KPIs. It is better to track a few relevant KPIs closely than to track a large number of KPIs superficially.
- It takes time to get results from your SEO efforts. One should not expect overnight success; rather, set goals that you can achieve over time.
- Keep tracking your KPIs over time. It will help you know how your SEO efforts are performing and make necessary adjustments to your strategy.
- Share your KPIs with your team. It will help keep everyone aligned with your SEO goals.
These tips will help you choose the appropriate SEO KPIs and track your progress towards your business goals.
Start tracking your SEO KPIs now
Regardless of the KPIs you decide to track for your SEO efforts, it is important to start collecting and analyzing data as soon as possible. The sooner you start, the more informed decisions you will make about your current performance and benchmarks.
By setting and measuring SEO KPIs consistently, you will be able to better evaluate your SEO capabilities and make data-driven decisions.
Establishing KPIs for SEO is also crucial to showing your progress to relevant stakeholders and gaining their support and commitment to the shared goals.
Final Thoughts
SEO KPIs play a crucial role in measuring the performance of SEO efforts over a period of time and creating a successful SEO strategy. Each metric gives a signal, either positive or negative, that can help you make informed decisions or indicate where to focus your attention. By constantly monitoring these KPIs and making changes along the way, you can improve the factors that directly impact your business goals. So start tracking these important SEP KPIs to make efforts in the right direction.
