SEO KPIs you should consider in your strategy

Another 9 interesting things to be tracked in your site

It may be hard to get a good picture of the impact of your SEO efforts without measuring some key metrics. You need to have a good idea of how your SEO is performing. The best way to do this is to set some measurable key performance indicators. To help you get an idea of what you should be looking to measure we've included a list of the most important metrics below.

1. Organic Traffic

This is the amount of traffic that comes to your website from organic (unpaid) search engine results.

It is one of the biggest indicators of how well your SEO is performing. If your organic traffic is going up then you can rest assured that you're doing something right. We would suggest setting a target for the amount of traffic that you want to receive. An example of a good target would be 10% of your total traffic for the whole year. This will give you a good idea of how well your SEO is doing and allow you to make informed decisions to improve your efforts.

The Performance tab in Google Search Console (GSC) is going to give you the most accurate view of your organic traffic over time.

2- Leads

Another important metric to measure is the number of leads that you get from organic traffic. This is typically one of the number one reasons why businesses use online marketing and so it's important to know if your efforts are getting you any leads. A good target to set is 100 leads per month. This would be a good indicator that you're on the right path. If you're not getting leads then you can try and focus on paid advertising.

3- Organic Conversion Rate

This is about the percentage of organic visitors who complete a specific goal, such as checking out, signing up, or subscribing to a service. Tracking these for all your traffic sources, including organic, is something most businesses already do. How? Setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics4 is easy cake. You don't need any coding knowledge to do it. The most important thing here is making sure that you track the right conversions.

The main advantage of conversion rate is that it provides an easy-to-understand metric that can help to evaluate the potential of a website and its ability to generate sales. In other words, it is a direct indicator of how good an ecommerce store is at getting visitors to purchase products.

The main disadvantage of conversion rate is that it is heavily dependent on the type of online business. Due to this, it may not be the best metric to evaluate an ecommerce store that is mostly focused on delivering information.

4. Average Position

This one tells us about the average rank of your website for a particular keyword on a search engine result page.

Position: The rank that a web page has on a search engine result page. For example, if a web page is in the top three results on a search engine, it will have a position of 1. If it is in the fourth to sixth list of results, it will have a position of 3. If a web page is in the seventh to tenth list of results, it will have a position of 6. The higher the position, the more likely someone is to click on the web page. Obviously a web page in the first position will have the most traffic.

The higher positions get a lot more clicks than pages in the middle. This is because it is human nature to be lazy to scroll down and look at the other options if you are not in the top few results. When you are in the top few, you will be in the best spot to get traffic.

5. Cost Per Click

This is the amount of money you pay for each click from a paid search advertising.

The cost per click is determined by the demand for the keyword and the competition for it. The more people that are after a keyword, the more likely it is that people are going to buy, and the more the price is going up.

This is the area where you need to make the majority of your decisions.

They say that you need to find a good balance. You don't want to be too expensive and you don't want to be too cheap. When you're too cheap, your listings might get a lot of views, but people will not convert. When you're too expensive, your site might be getting a lot of sales, but you won't be getting as many visitors. When you strike the right balance, you're going to get a lot of visitors and some of them will convert.

To help yourself find that balance, you also want to look at the volume of sales and the conversion rate. Ideally, you want to be in the top 20% of listings so you're getting a good amount of traffic, but not so much that you're being inundated with people.

6. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page.

A bounce is when someone comes to your website from a search engine, or from social media or from an external site, and then leaves without interacting with your content. The reason for this is that your site is not providing enough value for them.

The average bounce rate for a web-based business is around 60%. The higher this figure is, the less people are interacting with your site. If your bounce rate is below 50%, you should be concerned. This means that people are landing on your site and are interacting with it. If people are staying on your site after they land, they are more likely to make a purchase or contact you, which is good news.

Bounce rates are important to monitor because if you have a high number of people leaving your site after only one page, then you may need to improve your content.

The most common reasons that lead to high bounce rates are navigation issues and a lack of social proof, including testimonials and case studies.

To determine your bounce rate, you will need to use an analytics tool. The two most popular ones are Google Analytics and Woopra. These programs provide you with the average bounce rate for your industry and you should aim to be below that.

A lot of people will visit your site and if they don't find what they are looking for on the first page, they will leave. This is why you should include a search bar on every page, as well as social proof.

Finally, you should consider restoring the default website navigation that you had when you started building your site. This will help you to increase conversions and get people to buy.

7. New backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most crucial SEO ranking themes. It happens when you get prestigious references from other websites in your sector. The number and quality of new backlinks pointing to your website will be a good reflection of your SEO, content marketing, and PR efforts, so this is something most businesses should pay attention to. The SEO Powersuite has a very useful Ahrefs Content Explorer alternative called Backlink Explorer. It's less powerful than Ahrefs' tool but still pretty good for a free tool. It allows you to find backlinks, track them, and remove the ones that aren't useful for your website. It also gives you a few other insights into the backlinking process, such as linking domains and anchor text. If you're looking for a free tool that can give you insights into your backlinks, then we definitely recommend the SEO Powersuite Backlink Explorer. You can also check out Ahrefs' free tool, Ahrefs Explorer, but it's not as good as the paid one.

8. Number of indexed pages

This metric tells you how many of your pages a search engine has in its index. It's interesting to be there. Should you track it as one important SEO KPI? Well, it depends. Seeing the number of indexed pages steadily increasing as you publish new content is a solid indicator that Google is crawling and indexing your site. So consider tracking this number as a technical SEO KPI only if you're likely to have trouble getting your content indexed over time. How to track it? The best way to keep track of the number of your indexed pages is to check the Pages report in your GSC account. In there, select the 'All submitted pages' filter to only show pages from your sitemaps.

9. Search Visibility

Search visibility measures how visible your brand is in the market. Sometimes also referred to as SERP visibility, it's the SEO version of one of the most important marketing KPIs: SOV (share of voice). Should you track it as an SEO KPI?

Yes, you definitely should. Search visibility is one of the most useful and universally applicable SEO KPIs. In fact, it's the only non-conversion metric that can be directly tied to your business growth. That's because there's a strong link between SOV and market share. Normally, the higher your SOV, the bigger your share. To track it, paste the keywords that matter to you into a Rank Tracker. Note that these should be the main keywords that encompass what your target audience is searching for.

Final words

We approved these nine SEO metrics because they are important for measuring the effectiveness of your website's SEO strategy. Creating a great marketing strategy involves choosing the right objectives and measuring the success of our actions based on specific goals.

There are some things you shouldn't worry about too much when it comes to your online visibility, because they don't really affect your ranking. But there are other reasons why you might want to measure. It's a good idea to keep track of your performances.

Some of the tools that we use to measure our work on SEO are good choices to assess our progress overall. Although sometimes, it's better to not be too attached to certain measurements. Don't expect to just track some key performance indicators (KPIs) and magically improve your SEO. It will take some effort, as well as monitoring of your site's progress. To be able to make the best decisions, you need to be able to analyze and interpret the information you gather. Critical thinking, understanding your data, and tracking your progress are important skills when it comes to becoming a successful company.

If you liked this post feel free to comment and share! Thanks!