Measuring Your SEO Success: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Track

KPIs are used to measure and evaluate the performance of organizations. Thus, it is important for businesses, no matter their size, to have a more powerful presence online in the current world. 

SEO is used with great significance in gaining that visibility, bringing organic traffic to your site, and in turn, improving your revenue. 

But then, how do you know if the search engine optimization you are making is rich in rewards? SEO or Search Engine Optimization KPIs come in to assist in defining the measures of evaluation for a given campaign. 

 They are useful for tracking the progress, discovering the problems that hold your site back, and adjusting the strategies used for SEO. 

Let's delve into the key SEO KPIs you should be monitoring to measure your SEO success:

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1. Organic Traffic/Organic Sessions

Let's begin with the most fundamental metric: It relates to organic traffic that also can be referred to as organic sessions in this case within Google Analytics. Expected with the use of various keywords, this index identifies the number of visitors to your website originating from the SERPs after making a search.

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Why it's Important: Higher actual visitor numbers show that your website has a better position in SERPs for the terms target clients are searching for, and is, therefore, more likely to be found by people interested in your products, services, or content.

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Tracking Tips: 

The best tools that can be used to track the trends of organic traffic include Google Search Console as well as Google Analytics. 

‍Organize your traffic data by source to exclude the organic traffic data from other extraneous components such as paid advertising or social media referrals. 

Engage yourself now and then to capture the growth of the organic traffic to see if your SEO tactic is getting fruitful results.

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 2. Keyword Rankings

Keywords are the foundation of all parameters in SEO. They are the words and expressions that clients put into search to receive data they are searching for. Whereas organic traffic gives a general picture of the SEO performance,  keyword rankings give a detailed picture of the SEO performance for a particular keyword. 

Why It's Important: Keyword monitoring will give you an idea of how your website aligns itself with searches concerned with your audience and market segment. Generally, if a website’s rank for the right keywords is better then better ranking would translate to more organic traffic and conversion. 

 Tracking Tips: 

 Use keyword research tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs and type in the specific niche to obtain the best relevant keywords that have a lot of traffic and little competition. 

Monitor the fluctuating position of the websites concerning these target keywords by creating tables or graphs to show the ranking trend. 

 Focus on the surmountable Google Search results page positions and try to rank within the first three within the first SERP page. 

 3. Search Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) is the popularity of the site displayed in the search engine results; it is the ratio of people who clicked the link to your website. This varies because it depicts the degree of effectiveness of the search engine result page (SERP) snippet in convincing users to visit the intended site. 

 Why It's Important: A high CTR indicates that the title of your site, the meta description, and the overall snippet on the SERP are interesting and encourage the user to click through. 

 Tracking Tips: 

 Monitoring your CTR for different keywords can be done through Google Search Console. 

 Read your snippets on the SERP and find out where and why you can improve something. 

 A/B testing for the different title tags and meta descriptions can be performed to improve its CTR. 

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 4. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the measure of the number of people that come to a site and immediately leave after visiting only one page. High bounce rates can be due to your landing pages not being relevant to users’ search queries or not being user-friendly. 

 Why it's Important: A low bounce rate implies good interaction with the visitors on the website. Your website can provide your users with what they are in search of and they can spend their time beyond that. 

Tracking Tips:

Examine what is called the bounce rate by landing page in Google Analytics

Recognize the pages that have a high bounce rate and rationalize them.

Optimize the pages whose bounce rates are high by considering certain factors like the loading speed of the page, the quality of the content provided, and the way the customers navigate through the page.

5. Conversion Rate

Conversions are the most important thing to measure in SEO. It is the specific course of action a user may take on the website such as making a purchase, joining the newsletter, downloading the white paper, etc. 

Being compared to all the people who visit the website, the conversion rate represents the number of them, that is, the percentage of the total people who chose a set of actions, like buying a product or submitting a form online.

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Why it's Important: The rate of conversion acts as a measure of the productivity of search engine optimization campaigns that manage to bring about valuable user interactions. The measurement of your SEO’s return on investment is achievable through tracking your conversions.

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Tracking Tips: Configure the shop conversion goals using Google Analytics.

Track PPC keywords and landing pages that have the best conversions.

Elaborate on optimizing user engagement and displaying relevant content if you want to induce visitors to take specific actions.

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6. Domain Authority (DA)

Use the approach of Moz’s Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs in tracking the domain authority of your website.

Focus on the portfolio of links that are positioned positively in reputable sources to gain ranking for your website in search engines and consequently, get the score of Domain Authority (DA)

7. Backlinks

Backlinks are the nexus of your site when other sites invite you to their pages. It works as a recommendation to the users of your site’s content and credibility. Note that search engines give backlinks a lot of importance as a ranking factor on the web.

What it Means: Setting a comprehensive backlink profile using the links you will get from various high-authority websites can have a massive influence on your option to have a website and a search engine that is ranked in the high place.

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Monitoring Hints: Monitor your backlink profile using Ahrefs or SEMrush tools.

The best way is to channel most of your energy to obtaining backlinks from websites in your niche that are likely to be interested in your products and services.

Make sure to produce valuable content that is naturally attracting backlinks from other websites.

8. Brand Mentions

A brand mention is a citation of your brand which is done online and is not necessarily linked to your website. Although brand mentions are not a direct SEO metric, they can give insights into the growth of a brand for customers and related online visibility.

What it Means: More brand mentions can be considered the first sign that the brand sentiment of people is getting more positive and hence the potential for growth in organic traffic by merely searching people for your brand name. 

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Tracking Tips:

‍Listen to social conversations using apps such as Brand Mentions, and mention to be able to track brand mentions on the web.

Take the opportunity to thank those who shared a positive brand mention and solve any negative feedback as soon as possible if any issues arise.

Lead the respondents into mentioning the brand by interacting with your audience online and producing content that is easily shareable.

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9. Page Speed

Page speed is the time required for your website to load. Nowadays, with every one living a fast life, we expect websites to load instantly. Terrible loading experiences will result in poor SEO ratings and improper User Experiences.

What it Means: Google features websites that are loaded fast and this is one of the criteria for what a website appears high in the search results. Shorter loading time implementation can cause a rise in rankings, a decrease in bounce rates, and better user commitment.

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Tracking Tips: Inspect & improve the page speed of your website using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.

Track, identify and subsequently eliminate the reason for your slow page load time such as image files that are too large, or code that is inefficient.

Suppose you include caching or a CDN in your site, what it effectively does is by serving your content to the customer from different sources resulting in the faster load time of your website.

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10. Mobile Friendliness

With the escalating tendency of users to turn to mobile for all kinds of online activities, the choice of a mobile-friendly website is today no longer just a matter of preference. On the other hand, companies that run mobile-friendly websites are included in the list of preferences in Google search results.

Why it's Important: A responsive website that is essentially adaptable to any screen size ensures a smooth and flawless experience for the user on every device. So, this will automatically redirect to better SEO and will be interesting to many more readers.

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Tracking Tips: Run a test using the Google Mobile-Friendly Tool to see if your website is properly optimized for mobile.

Adapt the website’s design by using a responsive one to ensure it can perform on multiple screen sizes.

Do a test of your website on different cell phones to find any problems with the website.

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