It is important to measure the progress of your Search Engine Optimization activities. In this blog post I am going to put down the main KPIs you must track to check your SEO progress.
SEO results may take some time so it is important to keep the track of your progress. SEO KPI plays an important part and you should include it in your SEO strategy.
It also helps you manage the expectation of the client you are working for.
So are you ready ? Let’s dive into it.
Here is the list of KPIs that you should be tracking.
- Keyword Ranking
- Backlinks
- Organic Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
- Bounce Rate
- Page Speed
- User Average time on page
- Coverage issue
- Organic session
- Organic visibility
- Conversions
- Return on Investment (ROI)
Let’s see all of these points one by one.
1. Keywords Ranking
You should maintain a weekly and monthly ranking report in a spreadsheet and keep the progression of your rank over time.
Tracking your target keywords ranking is not the same as it used to be. Because of semantic search; the SERP page differs from person to person.
Despite this, keeping the track of your keywords is important and allows you to have a better understanding of how your strategy is paying off.
Here how to find keywords the right keywords.
2. Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the important ranking factors for Google search. We must keep an eye on our link profile.
A link profile is a collection of backlinks to your website. Google and other search engines like the links from high-authority sites including a variety of sites.
You should work on getting high-quality backlinks and avoid spam or toxic backlinks.
You can track the following the Backlinks KPI
- Total number of links to your website
- Links from high-authority websites
- Lost backlinks
- Toxic or spammy links.
3. Organic Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
It is important to track the CTR on both page-level and query level.
It is important KPI tells you how your site title and description appear on the SERP and if it is click-worthy.
Organic CTR depends on the ranking position on SERP but it is also influenced by your title, description, URL, and rich snippets.
You can analyze the organic CTR of your page in your Google Search console.
4. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a metric that tells you what percent of traffic or visitors left your site from the landing page without exploring the other pages.
Bounce rate tells you if your content is engaging enough relevant to the visitors.
A high bounce rate means your need to work on your content and make it more compelling.
You can check your bounce rate in Google Analytics
Behaviour > site > All pages.
5. Page Speed
Page speed is the time the page takes to load completely on the visitor’s browser.
Page speed can affect your ranking and conversions. When a page loads quickly it is more likely that visitors will explore your website.
Page speed is a metric that you need to check often as it might change over time with the new content on the website.
Page speed also affects the bounce rate of your website. Along with the quality of your content, your website speed needs to be good.
GTMetrix is a tool to check website speed.
6. User Average time on page
It is necessary that your visitor should engage with your content on your website.
The longer visitors stay and engage with your websites there are more chances that they will convert.
So it is important to measure the average time of visitors on page level and sitewide.
You can check the average time of visitors in Google Analytics by going to Behaviour > site > content > all pages
7. Coverage issue
Crawl errors are one of the key errors that could potentially hinder your website from ranking on the search engine result page.
You can find different crawl errors in your search console. The common crawl errors are as below.
- 5xx server error
- 4xx server error
- Crawling anomalies
- No index page error
- Crawled but currently not indexed error
- Discovered but the page is currently not indexed error
- Duplicate error submitted URL not selected as canonical
- Pages are blocked by robots.txt
It is important to stay on top of this error as these are hindering your pages to rank on the SERP.
You can figure out this kind of error in the search console and Google also provides the documentation and help to resolve these errors.
You should measure these errors as KPI you should keep the errors to a minimum so that your site health remains always good.
8. Organic visibility
Organic visibility is one of the important KPI organic visibility means for certain keywords where your website is ranking.
Again inside the search console, you can find out the organic visibility. The total impression tab tells you the total number of impressions your site has got for your target keywords.
You should measure this KPI and work towards improving organic visibility.
9. Organic Sessions
Once you get a good rank on the search engine result page you should see an increase in your organic sessions.
You will come to know if your content is really useful and compelling to the readers. If your content is good then there will be good organic sessions user will engage more with your content.
10. Conversions
Conversions are nothing but the leads you get for your business. we put all the efforts into SEO to get the conversions.
Better visibility gives you more visitors to your website and with more visitors you get more chances of conversions.
Depending on your goal you should decide your conversion. Suppose you want visitors to download e-books from your website then you can add form fillups as a conversion.
You can check my video about how to add goals to your Google analytics.
11. Return on Investment (ROI)
We all know the goal of any SEO, Google ads, or social media campaign is to generate more return on the investment.
It is the most important KPI to measure as it directly tells you how successful your SEO campaign was.
The returns should be higher than the money and efforts spent on SEO campaigns. So you should always be measuring the return on investment for your SEO campaign.
All in All
Setting up KPIs and measuring it on a consistent basis helps you stay focused on your SEO strategy and your SEO campaign.
The KPIs that I have mentioned above are not exclusive every marketer and every marketing agency may have different KPIs based on the business needs and demands from other stakeholders.
But the KPI I have explained above are the important ones for your SEO campaign success. These can also help you to stay on track and progress towards the growth of your SEO.