7 KPIs to track your SEO and get better results

The importance of tracking the right SEO metrics

Goals and SEO metrics are among the most important parts of your SEO strategy, yet one of the most overlooked areas.

Without metrics, you won’t be able to track your campaign’s progress and make sure your investment is paying off or determine if you’re on the right path to success.

It’s no hidden secret that SEO takes time to deliver results and ROI, but by determining your metrics you can better demonstrate the impact your strategy is having on your business.

They can also help you manage expectations with other stakeholders. SEO metrics should form the basis of your strategy and serve as a way to both measure and report on success and progress. But you need to know what to measure.

In the guide below, I’ll help you understand the key KPIs you should be using.

1. ROI

For almost all companies, the ultimate goal of an SEO strategy is ROI (Return On Investment). Whether it’s an investment in an in-house team and resources or an agency, it means you see more money back than you spend.

ROI is an indicator that you can measure for all of your marketing campaigns. When you calculate the ROI of SEO, you determine if the net revenue is worth the money you spend to optimize your site.

Here’s the formula to calculate your ROI percentage:

(Return on investment — Cost of investment) / Cost of investment

Keep in mind that it is common for this parameter to be negative at the beginning. But with a successful strategy, you will see the positive dynamics within a few months.

So how do you define the right KPI?

Tracking all existing metrics at once is a waste of time. You should choose individual SEO KPIs based on your project goals. Conducting a keyword gap analysis would be a good start to understand the current situation and then determine your project goals. Here are the most important criteria when choosing key metrics to evaluate your SEO results:

Determine your goals.

What do you want to achieve? If you want to get more visitors, set the goal to something like “increase the number of visitors by 30% by the end of the year.”

Approve the budget.

Define the amount you can spend on SEO before you start.

Choose the right tracking tools.

Are you ready to buy well-known tracking tools? Do you use Google Analytics or CRM systems? Automate the tracking process to save time and get in-depth reports.

2. Conversions (sales and leads)

While a financial return is the overarching metric that many companies work with, it might take some time to see the money come in. And for that reason, you shouldn’t only measure ROI.

Measuring and tracking organic conversions (either sales, leads or both depending on your business) is a great way to see progress. After all, an increase in organic conversions can easily be traced back to your work.

Be sure to note the baseline before you start working on a campaign; otherwise, you’ll have a harder time analysing the improvement.

One recommendation is to take an average of conversions generated in the three months prior to your campaign and use this as a benchmark to measure growth.

You can track conversions in Google Analytics, measure lead conversion goals and the eCommerce report to track sales by channel.

3. Organic visibility

Given that it takes time for SEO to generate financial returns, organic visibility is a good KPI that you can track and measure to show consistent growth. And you can measure and report this in two ways.

Below you can see organic views from Google Search Console.

This is the perfect way to see increased visibility given that impressions show the searches that your site was visible to, even if they didn’t result in clicks. This is usually because you are seeing an increase in indexed (ranked) keywords, but they are not in traffic-bearing positions (yet).

Either way, an increase in exposure shows an increase in organic visibility and a great measure of continued growth.

You can also see an increase in organic visibility by looking at keyword trends in the Organic Research tool in SEMrush, where you can see how your visibility has changed for all indexed keywords, including those in lower positions.

4. Organic traffic

This KPI measures how many visitors come to the site from organic search results.

It’s one of the most important SEO KPIs. Because growth here gives a clear indication that you’re achieving the most important SEO goal: increasing the number of people who see and visit your website.

If you’re working with Google Analytics (and you definitely should be), you can easily track daily searches in your site traffic. Go to the “Audience > Overview” report, click on “Add segments” and select “Organic traffic”.

In that report, you can see how the number of organic sessions changes over time and discover how it correlates with the total number of sessions.

5. Ranking

It’s no secret that the higher your website ranks for relevant keywords, the better.

Search rankings are a crucial KPI because it correlates directly with your SEO efforts. Once you get those higher search positions, you’re on your way to achieving the other goals like traffic, leads and conversions.

It’s also important to track your rankings for the right keywords.

You can monitor how your keyword positions are changing with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. All you need to do is enter your domain, choose the type of SERP (you need organic results), import the list of keywords and start tracking.

The reports will give you information about your current positions and how they changed. In addition, you can also select competitors’ domains and get reports on their rankings for the tracked keywords.

6. Links (backlinks)

Links are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, and there’s no sign of that changing. You need to know the current “health” of your link profile, both in terms of detecting new links as well as any problems with bad links.

The link statistics you should be measuring are:

• Total number of links
• Total number of referring domains
• Number of lost links
• Number of new links
• Bad links

And you can track all these with tools like Ahrefs and SERanking, then you also need to compare your own link profile with your closest competitors.

7. Organic CTR

Another important SEO metric is click-through rate (CTR). CTR is a performance metric that measures the ratio of clicks on your link to the total number of users who viewed the search results. In other words, high CTR = high traffic.

CTR is also an important ranking signal for search engines. For example, if your search results don’t look appealing enough, even high rankings won’t help you get more visitors. Low CTR tells search engines that your site is not meeting users’ expectations, which can lead to lower rankings.

By tracking your organic CTR, you can find out why your high impressions aren’t leading to more traffic and then fix the problem.

To monitor your CTR, go to Google Search Console and click on Average CTR, see below.

SEO KPIs — Summary

Determining and measuring SEO metrics can help you organise your SEO efforts and continuously measure campaign results.

While every marketer has their own KPIs that they need to track and report to key stakeholders, the fact is that you need to have these in place and regularly analyze your site’s performance against them.

KPIs can help keep growth on track while also serving as an indicator that you’re seeing progress towards your larger goals.