By now, you must be working hard on your search engine optimization (SEO) from sunrise to sunset. However, there would be times you'd be asking why your rankings or online visibility is not working even though you're working hard enough with your SEO.
Whether you're starting a new hobby or employing some SEO strategies, it's essential to measure and monitor your progress to know if it's a success or if it needs a little more tweaking.
But what metric should you use to monitor your SEO performance?
KPI is a measurable metric that's used to track progress towards a goal. It helps organizations or businesses assess their strengths and weaknesses, make decisions, and optimize their performance. KPI allows you to measure the impact of your SEO efforts on your website.
Whatever industry you're serving, there's a set of important SEO KPIs that you must track to measure your SEO work. To guide you, we've highlighted below the most important SEO KPIs so you can start monitoring and assessing your performance.
Before tracking down your KPIs, you must have an existing SEO strategy in effect. A Singapore top Google SEO agency can provide you with the best-tailored SEO services you need for your website performance.
Search visibility or search engine visibility is a metric that measures your brand or business' visibility in the market. It's the only non-conversion metric that can easily be tied to the growth of your business. There's a direct variation between visibility and market share, which means as your visibility increases, so is your market share.
This metric accounts not only for links but also for the knowledge panel, local packs, featured snippets, and other SERP features. You can also use Google Search Console to track this important SEO KPI. The free tool gives you an overview of your organic visibility and showcases your total impressions over some time.
Organic traffic, also known as organic sessions, is simply free traffic. It's where visitors visit your website from unpaid sources. If you're currently holding paid ads for your website, tracking your organic traffic can get you insights into how many users have visited your website through advertisements. However, in general, more organic traffic doesn't translate to profit, so tracking them would be just to compare it with your current paid ads.
There are tools available online which you can use to check your position in SERPs for your target keywords compared to other websites. If you don't want to use other sites, Google Search Console also provides this data, allowing you to exclude branded searches and view organic clicks for non-branded terms.
Take note as well of seasonal shifts in your data to check out patterns.
Conversions refer to converting visiting users on your website to paying customers. When you track your organic conversions, you can relate your marketing efforts to your revenue and directly measure the success of your SEO strategy.
If you want to start tracking organic conversions, make sure to note your conversion benchmark before working on a campaign. It can serve as the baseline before your SEO strategy begins, and it'd be easy to track any changes. Over time, you can also track the conversion rate as a percentage of your organic traffic, which will help in analysing the efficiency of your strategy as traffic shifts.
You can use Google Analytics to track your organic conversions. It also streamlines conversion tracking with events. Here's an example from Google in marking events as conversions:
ROI or Return On Investment evaluates the performance of an investment. When related to SEO, it estimates the value of all the SEO investments or activities in comparison to the cost.
If you want to compute your SEO ROI, you can use the formula below:
(Gain from Investment - Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment
Take note that it's common for this metric to be negative in the beginning, but as you continue with your SEO strategy, you'd see positive results within months. Before tracking you need to know your ROI target to you can measure your performance regularly.
It would be a little difficult to measure this KPI properly as it would take some time before your desired results will manifest. Moreover, results could be different from what's intended.
Backlinks from high domain authority help in increasing your ranking. The number and quality of these links reflect your SEO strategy, so it's one of the most important SEO metrics to track. Moreover, backlinks are a direct ranking factor in search engine ranking.
It's only suitable to track, however, if you're active in link building and keep track of your links. Otherwise, it'd be counterproductive as there's no sufficient data or backlink to track.
When you track backlinks, it's important to note the following metrics:
These metrics are not sufficient though, as you may need to compare your numbers with that of your competitors. There are free tools online which you can use to track your competitors' backlink data to yours.
Keyword rankings are defined as your web page's specific spot in the search engine results pages for search queries. Tracking keyword rankings helps improve your keyword research as the usage of target keywords in optimizing your content improves your search rankings. You can use free tools online to track keyword rankings, which would give you data about the position and search volume of your tracked keywords.
You can also use this KPI to track the keywords you rank well for and those that you don't, which gives you a gauge on improving your content.
While using relevant keywords in optimizing your content helps increase your online visibility, search visibility is far more superior KPI to track.
If you want to know more about how to improve your keyword research, international SEO experts can help you drive business growth.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) refers to the total amount of profit expected from each customer throughout their relationship with your business. It's one of the most important SEO KPIs to track as it shows the long-term value of each visitor converted into a customer and helps in allocating your SEO investments. It helps you make better decisions on making content, targeting keywords, and making conversion funnels.
You can further your tracking by dividing the customer base into tiers and making more informed decisions on optimization and resource allocation. For example, if you see that the customers purchasing the cheaper products give you the most profit throughout their relationship with your business, you can optimize content to push users toward those products.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) measures the cost of converting a user. It includes team salaries, agency costs, content marketing, and even link building. When compared to CLV, it can provide insights on the inefficiencies in converting new customers such as wrong keywords or addressing the wrong target audience.
If you want to know your CPA, you can calculate it using this formula:
(Total Cost of SEO) / (Conversions) = CPA
As we've said, it will take time for your campaigns to have any noticeable impact, so your CPA might not be as good at the start.
Google Business Profile is a free tool used to manage your business' presence across Google, including search results and Google Maps. You can track searches, views, clicks, queries and calls directly from your profile. With a lot of users searching with local keywords, you can track local organic traffic which allows you to know the areas where your organic traffic comes from.
For example, if you've typed in the keywords "salon in Singapore", something like this would show up in your search results:
This is what they call Google Local Pack, which is like the Beverly Hills of search results. There are over thousands of people searching for "salon in Singapore" but the first four businesses in the Google Local Pack get the most exposure, website visitors, and phone calls.
If you want to rank locally, you can use the metrics available on Google Business Profile to check your growth and performance over time. A case study that can be found here provides how local SEO can do wonders for your business.
The click-through rate (CTR) refers to the rate at which your SERP impressions are clicked. It represents how effective your listing is in attracting people to visit your website. If you want to compute your CTR, you can use this formula:
(Total Clicks on Ad) / (Total Impressions) = CTR
While it directly refers to the number of clicks on your listing, it doesn't necessarily correlate to the sales or profits converted from the visit. You can use CTR as a page-level metric in making sure your search snippets like the meta title and meta descriptions appeal to users, but you don't necessarily need to obsess over it.
Another part of the click-through rate is high impression and low click pages. Impressions are defined as how often a user sees a link on Google, which can be scrolled or expanded into view. While SEO strategies don't include high impressions but instead high clicks from relevant keywords, you can monitor pages with high impressions and low clicks to take action into increasing clicks.
For example, you have created a high-quality listicle but it's at position 10 with high impressions and low clicks. After comparing your content to your competitors, you realised that their lists are longer than yours. With this, you'd be able to optimise your content and add more to your listicle to make it more valuable.
Core Web Vitals refer to the three technical SEO metrics that refer to loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. While it won't give you a significant boost in your rankings, Google highly recommends achieving good Core Web Vitals to ensure a great user experience. Its core ranking system rewards websites that provide a good page experience not only in desktop searches but also for mobile searches. Besides, when users are happy, there's a great chance they become loyal paying customers.
If you have a slow site speed, you need to address it as well as Google penalises websites that have slow loading speeds. You can use the following metrics from Google below to check if your Core Web Vitals is up to par:
Engagement metrics or user engagement shows how users engage with your website. It includes indicators such as bounce rate, engagement rate, and average time on page or average session duration. The importance of user engagement varies from the type of website or business you have. Depending on the context of your business or your goals, each metric can be evaluated. It doesn't directly reflect your SEO success, but it can be used as a secondary SEO metric.
The bounce rate is a good indicator of how many users visit your website and then leave without doing anything. If your website's success depends on multiple pages from product pages to the checkout process, a high bounce rate would indicate that users leave upon entering your website. And you don't want that. Tracking the bounce rate can give you an idea of what to improve in keeping visitors engaged.
The longer a user spends time on your website, the more engaged they are. The more engaged a user is on your website, the higher the chance they'd turn into paying customers. Tracking the average session duration can give you insight into how to keep users engaged longer on your website and convert them into paying customers.
Branded traffic is measured by users who searched for terms that contain your business or brand. It's not necessarily an indication of SEO success., but if brand awareness is important for SEO campaigns, then it should be one of the KPIs you should track.
This type of traffic results in the highest conversion rates since users already know what they need or want. Here's an example of a branded search for "nike air force 1":
Non-branded traffic is comprised of people searching the keywords around the products or services you rank for. It's traffic from users who haven't heard of your website or business. It can look like this in the search results, for example, when you generally type in the keyword "basketball shoes":
When you track branded and non-branded traffic, you'd be able to check the different search intent and reach users at different stages of the buying process.
This metric can be easily confused with the other cost per click in marketing which refers to how much advertisers pay for ads placed in search results, social media, and websites per click. This KPI, however, refers to the organic cost per click that defines how much you pay for each visitor coming from organic search results.
If you want to compute it, you can use the following formula:
(Your budget) / (Website traffic)
The budget in this formula represents all the money you spent on your SEP efforts, including salaries, tools, copywriting, etc. Your CPC will continually decrease as your SEO strategy becomes effective.
This essential SEO metric is straightforward. It just refers to the number of pages you have that search engines have in their index. It's good to track this metric as it'd give you an indicator that search engines like Google don't have problems crawling or indexing your web pages. If your pages don't generally have a problem getting indexed, you can use this as an indicator if a few pages fail to get indexed.
A website health score shows the total number of errors and warnings found from your crawled web pages. It's a good metric for checking your website's technical SEO. However, website health score only checks the number of errors and not their quality, so errors, regardless of their seriousness, are grouped the same.
Domain authority shows the strength of a website's backlink profile and is commonly used when building backlinks. However, there's a need to assess the backlinks properly other than the domain rating of a website.
You can use your Domain Rating to gauge your "ranking potential". If you have the same domain rating as that of your competitor, you can also check the keywords that contribute to their traffic yet not for you.
However, don't only focus too much on growing this metric. It's still important to create high-quality content and get high-quality backlinks for your content.
Just as it's important to learn the latest SEO techniques to stay on top of your game, your SEO success also depends upon the data from the techniques you've employed. You'd be able to make informed and better decisions by tracking and analysing your SEO KPIs, which would then lead to better results.
Meanwhile, if you're still not sure about your next big digital marketing decision, the best digital marketing consultant can help you achieve greater heights.
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