Learn how to measure SEO success: The 12 essential SEO KPIs

12 SEO KPIS for success

Through these metrics you will be able to keep track of how well your SEO actions. We use in Marketzilla indistinctly these parameters to measure our SEO strategy with our clients. 

Misleading SEO KPIs:

It is important when establishing the SEO KPIs We need to make sure that we are selecting some or all of the right ones from the list. There are certain KPIs that can be misleading, skew our measurements and mislead our decision making. Some of these are:

Total Number of Visits

• While traffic may seem like a good indicator, not all traffic is valuable. What really matters is qualified traffic, i.e. users who are potential customers or are interested in your content. It is also important to know the intentionality rates of the keywords you rank for. 

Number of Page Views

• While it might suggest that users are interacting with your site, this KPI tells you nothing about the quality of the interaction. A user could be browsing multiple pages and still not find what they are looking for.

Number of followers on social networks

• Although great for ego, having a high number of followers on social media does not guarantee SEO success or a better conversion rate. This KPI is more relevant for social media marketing strategies than for SEO.

Number of Downloads or Newsletter Subscriptions

• These can be good indicators of engagement or interest, but they don't necessarily translate into better SEO performance. You could have lots of subscribers but low organic traffic, which is a problem.

Total Time on Site

• A longer time might suggest that users find your content interesting, but it could also mean that they have difficulty finding what they need, which is not a good indicator of an optimised user experience.

ROI (Return of Investment)

Every company that makes an investment expects a return. Therefore, tracking the ROI of your SEO tactics is essential to be able to measure in euros that more money has come in than you have invested in these actions in the medium term. Normally, ROI is calculated over a period of 6 to 12 months.

Profitability can be calculated by considering what you have invested in SEO in relation to the revenue you have earned through this channel.

2. Conversions (sales and leads)

Of course ROI should not be your only indicator to measure your success. Measuring organic conversions and following them, should be your next step. Note that conversions can be in the form of sales (if it's an ecommerce) or in the form of leads (if it's a form, a call or a file download). Increasing organic conversions is directly related to SEO efforts.

Before you start with your SEO strategy, you should have a reference on what the current situation is. This avoids confusion as to whether the increase was a previous trend or a product of your efforts.

A good starting point can be to take the previous quarter as a reference before starting. We then contrast this with the quarter developed through the SEO strategy. 

Via Google Analytics 4 we can track conversions that have been previously set up on the website. You may need to set up some specific ones that you are interested in measuring.

Organic visibility

Organic visibility is one of the most important KPIs relevant. In order to measure it properly you can use Google Search Console measuring impressions. Impressions are the number of times your URL result is displayed in the SERPs in response to a keyword and is viewed by the user.

Impressions do not reflect clicks. If your SEO is working and you are ranking on the first page for keywords, impressions will increase. If clicks do not increase, it will affect the CTR. But that's another story, as we will have to review the title and meta description that are responsible for favouring that metric.

Another metric that will help us to understand whether our organic visibility is improving is by studying the growth trends of organic keywords. We can do this with the Semrush keyword research tool.

4. Number of organic sessions

When we manage to increase the organic impressions, verified through Google Search Console, the organic sessions should increase proportionally. And you may ask yourself, but what is organic sessions (coming from organic searches), it is simply “traffic” to your website.

With Google Analytics 4 we can easily calculate organic sessions. However, to find out the SEO KPIs It is best to use Google Search Console to see clicks on non-branded search keywords. Branded searches should be removed as they skew the results. 

If you have a Semrush account, you can easily do this using filters:

In order to eliminate seasonality as a growth factor, we must make a comparison with the previous year. 

5. Branded vs. unbranded traffic

An important metric is to look at the investment of branded traffic in favour of non-branded traffic. At the agency, we have clients who have a lot of advertising efforts and have brands with a lot of brand recognition. Therefore, in many cases, 80% of their traffic comes from branded searches. The mission of a SEO strategy is to grow organic traffic, or traffic that comes from searches where the brand is not present. For example:

Brand search: Nike Basketball Shoes

Unbranded search: Basketball shoes

Obviously we are interested in attracting organic traffic as they are customers who do not know our company and also, adding up the searches of that market, they are always much more voluminous than those of the brand. You can calculate this with Semrush:

6. Keyword positioning

The monitoring of critical keywords is extremely important to know if we are positioning correctly those keywords that represent products or services. 

Previously one of the main KPIs for evaluating strategy, one URL can now rank for tens or even hundreds of keywords. Nevertheless, it is still a good indicator that important keywords rank preferentially. 

At the seo agency we use the Semrush position tracking tool:

7. Link or backlink profile

As I am writing this article from the Marketzilla's team of SEO experts, In this respect, it can be certified that the link profile is still one of the main ranking factors in search engines such as Google. 

Therefore, in order to find out what state or point your website is in with regard to this issue, you should analyse on the one hand how many links you currently have, from how many domains, how many of them are between 30 and 100 domain authority and if, within this profile, you have toxic links that should be sent to Disavow from Google Search Console. 

It is also important to review the missing links to try to recover them and to see where the gained links come from. At Marketzilla SEO Agency we use the Analysis of backlinks and the Audit Semrush backlink analysis to simplify this task:

8. Organic CTR calculation

This metric is very important and represents the percentage of potential customers who click on search results linked to your website. This percentage is directly related to impressions. It is calculated by dividing the number of impressions by the number of clicks. The final result determines the CTR percentage. 

Now you may be wondering, how can we positively influence this metric to convert better, that's a good question. The answer is by modifying the title (which has SEO power) and the meta description (which has more impact on CTR). 

Using Google Search Console, we can analyse the average CTR of our queries or keywords and the urls involved as shown in the following graph:

9. Bounce rate

If your bounce rate is too high, it means that you are not managing to retain your potential customers and therefore your traffic sources are losing strength. 

The bounce rate indicates the exit of a user once they have accessed your website without taking any action. This could be clicking on a link, filling out a contact form or making a purchase. Logically, if the rate is high, it would indicate that the content is not relevant or is not well aligned to the users who visit it. Therefore, working on developing quality content is essential.  

This KPI is used by Google to evaluate the quality of a website. If the rate is high, it could conclude that the quality of the content is low or irrelevant to the target audience and affect keyword rankings.

The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of visits that did not take any action by the total number of visits in a given period. For example, if a website receives 100 visits and 80 of them leave the page without taking any action, the bounce rate would be 80%. Note that this calculation is based on G4, as Google Analytics Universal was calculated slightly differently. 

You can find out the bounce rate of your urls in Google Analytics 4 at Behaviour > Site content > All pages. Please note that you will have to configure this SEO KPI in G4 to be able to see it. Here is a video so you can follow it.

10. Average time on page or average session time

The longer a potential customer stays on the page, the more likely they are to interact. Therefore, there is a greater chance of conversion. It is therefore very important to increase the average time that users spend on your page as a key to performance. If we observe short user times, we will have to study ways to increase them. 

You can see these times in Google Analytics 4 in the behavioural area.

11. Indexation and coverage problems

The “crawl errors” found through Google Search Console represent so-called coverage problems that can affect your website's ranking. 

Typically these errors are:

• Errors 5xx
• Errors 4xx
• Various tracking problems
• Urls noindex
• Pages crawled, but not indexed
• Pages discovered, but not indexed
• Duplicate pages, these are URLs submitted but not selected as canonical.
• URLs blocked by robots.txt file

Monitoring and resolving these issues can be taken as a KPI as they can affect the success of your SEO strategy.

12. Web loading speed and performance

The loading speed of your website, especially on mobile devices, can directly impact your rankings. In addition, if your web speed is poor, it will increase your bounce rate and therefore directly affect your performance. The best measurement tool for this is Google's own PageSpeed. However, even if you currently have good results, keep in mind that the measurement changes over time. 

This may be because the photos have not been optimised correctly when uploading new content and may be slowing down the website.

You may need to renew the server and increase the Ram memory. Therefore, the review of the loading speed should be a constant subject. Using the Semrush Site Audit tool you can regularly run this work in an automated way. 

Below is a screenshot of a PageSpeed measurement:

These 12 SEO KPIs that we propose are the most important to know if you are on the right track. They will also tell you if you are achieving the goals you have set and if this is having the expected effect on the reality of the company in terms of sales or leads.