SEO KPIs: 11 KPIs for SEO to Track & Measure

Which are the most important SEO KPIs?

Gather ten different SEO pandits & ask them the above question.

You’ll get ten different answers.

Why? Because KPIs are unique to every business, and the ones that help you win won’t be your competitor’s aces.  

There are over 49+ KPIs in SEO. Rather than explaining each, we’ll give you the ones you can never turn your backs on. These were curated with insights from our top SEO experts, so keep your eyes peeled.

Let’s start.

What are KPIs?

KPI’s or key performance indicators are the vital metrics that help you rank your website. They help in tracking your search progress and plan your strategies to up your game. For example, organic traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc.

To understand and track these quantifiable metrics, you can use the SuiteJar tool to track the on-the-go. Getting accurate KPI metrics can help you improve your ROI.

Benefits of KPIs

There are many benefits of SEO KPIs. By tracking the right KPIs, you can get a clear picture of your SEO progress and identify areas that need improvement. This can help you focus your efforts on the most effective strategies and optimize your campaigns for better results.

Some of the most important benefits of SEO KPIs include:

• Improved ROI: By tracking the right KPIs, you can ensure the effectiveness of your campaigns and therefore improve the ROI.
• Greater clarity: Understand what is working and what isn’t allows you to make necessary changes to improve your SEO strategy.
• Enhanced decision-making: With greater clarity on your SEO progress, you can make more informed decisions about where to allocate your resources for the best results.
• Increased visibility: Improving your SEO can lead to increased visibility for your website, which can translate into more traffic and potential customers.
• Better brand awareness: A strong SEO strategy can help build brand awareness for your business, which can be beneficial for both online and offline marketing efforts.

Now let’s take a look at what they are.

SEO KPIs to Track

1. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is when visitors arrive on a client’s website via unpaid search results on search engines.

It refers to the number of visitors to your website without paying for advertising. You can increase your organic traffic and attract more potential customers to your website by optimizing your website’s structure and content for relevant keywords.

The volume of organic traffic indicates how many people are interested in your website and its content.

2. Conversion rate

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or completing a contact form.

Organic conversions are one of the most important SEO KPIs, whether they are sales, leads, subscriptions, or any other action that makes money.

It is possible to increase your conversion rate and turn more visitors into customers by improving your website’s user experience and optimizing your conversion funnel.

3. Bounce rate 

The number of visitors to your website who leave without engaging with your content or taking any action.

An increased bounce rate indicates your website is not engaging or relevant to your target audience. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. 

It is important to optimize your website’s content and user experience to decrease bounce rates and encourage visitors to explore more of it. 

Why does the bounce rate increase? Well, mainly because the content is not meeting the needs of our audience, targeting the wrong crowd, or the page speed is too slow. 

4. Backlinks

Backlinks refer to links from external websites to your website, which can help improve your search engine rankings. 

The more high-quality backlinks your client has, the higher the chances they will rank on search engine result pages.

Tracking backlinks in SEO provides various benefits for businesses looking to improve their search engine rankings and visibility. Here are some of the benefits of tracking backlinks:

• Build authority and trust: High-quality backlinks from authoritative websites can improve your website’s credibility and authority in the eyes of search engines. This can help improve your search engine rankings and attract more organic traffic to your website.
• Bring in referral traffic: Backlinks can also drive referral traffic to your website. If a user clicks on a backlink to your website, they may visit your website and explore more of your content.
• Help index websites faster: Backlinks can help search engines discover and index your website faster. When a search engine crawls a website and finds a backlink to your website, it may follow the link to your website and index your website faster.
• Monitor competitor backlinks: Tracking your competitors’ backlinks can also help you identify new link-building opportunities for your website. By analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles, you can identify authoritative websites in your industry and work to get backlinks from those websites.

5. Click-through rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement.

CTR is an important metric for measuring the success of an ad campaign or the effectiveness of a particular web page or email.

It directly measures how well your marketing efforts resonate with your target audience. A high CTR indicates that your ad or content is relevant and engaging to your target audience, while a low CTR can indicate that your messaging needs improvement.

Benefits of tracking and improving your CTR:

• Improved ad performance: A higher CTR indicates that your ads are resonating with your target audience and driving more clicks to your website. This can improve the overall performance of your ad campaigns and increase your return on investment.
• Better search engine rankings: In the context of SEO, a higher CTR can indicate to search engines that your content is relevant and engaging to users. This can improve your search engine rankings, driving more organic traffic to your website.
• Increased conversion rates: A high CTR can indicate that your landing page or website is well-designed and optimized to drive conversions. By improving your CTR, you can increase your chances of converting website visitors into customers.

Using organic CTR in conjunction with your title tag and meta description (the elements that appear on the SERPs) can help you determine how relevant your content is.

6. Loading time

It is the rate at which your site loads.

Loading speeds are crucial as they impact bounce rates and other metrics that can affect long-term search engine rankings.

If a customer lands on your website and it takes more than three seconds to load, they will most likely leave.

Your page speeds will suffer if you use a lot of images, GIFs, and videos with large sizes. The images and videos might look appealing and appeal to your audience, but if the page doesn’t load quickly, viewers are likely to click the back button and move on to another website.

Here are some tips to improve your website’s loading time:

• Compressing and resizing images can significantly reduce their file size and improve loading time.
• Reduce the number of requests your website makes to the server by minimizing the use of images, scripts, and stylesheets.
• Caching allows the browser to store certain files, such as images and scripts, locally on the user’s device. This can speed up loading time for returning visitors.
• Minimize your website’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to reduce file size and improve loading time.
• A CDN stores your website’s files on servers around the world, improving loading time for visitors in different locations.
• Limit the number of custom fonts used on your website and consider using web-safe fonts to reduce file size and improve loading time.

Use Suitejar’s website auditor feature to keep track of your page loading time and optimize them to ensure good website performance.

7. Rank tracking

Rank tracking is the process of monitoring a website’s search engine ranking position for specific keywords.

It provides granular insight into which keywords are driving your traffic and why.

As a result of the emergence of semantic search, a single page of content can rank for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of keywords at once.

Knowing what keywords you rank well for, as well as those you don’t, can help you understand what you’re doing well with your content and what needs to be improved.

8. Returning customers

Repeat visitors are important for understanding how well your website resonates with the market. If people repeatedly use a service, they are effectively vouching for it.

The ratio of repeat visitors to unique visitors will vary from site to site, but you can track whether this number is improving or deteriorating over time. The people who regularly use a website are also more likely to mention it in forums, blog posts, or social media channels.

Marketers can use analytics to gain insights into returning customers by tracking and analyzing key metrics related to their behavior on the website.

9. Featured snippets

Featured snippets are summarized answers to user search queries that are displayed at the top of SERP results.

SEO marketers should track featured snippets because they can greatly increase high-value traffic to your website—even more so than ranking first.” To target and track featured snippets, use a tool like Suitejar, which shows which search queries have featured snippets and what elements they contain.

To determine the value of traffic to your website, identify your top featured-snippet keywords and benchmark traffic to your website, specifically the page you are using to target the featured snippet before and after you win it.

10. The average position

Average position is a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that measures the average ranking of your website or a web page in search engine results pages (SERPs) for a particular keyword or set of keywords.

It is a crucial metric in SEO because it helps you understand how visible your website is to users searching for specific keywords.

Tracking average position helps you monitor your website’s search engine visibility over time. By tracking changes in your website’s average position, you can identify opportunities to improve your search engine rankings and visibility.

You can identify which keywords are performing well and which ones need improvement. This can help you optimize your content and SEO strategy to target the most relevant and effective keywords.  

By setting targets for your average position and tracking progress over time, you can assess the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and make data-driven decisions about optimizing it.

11. Organic visibility

Organic visibility measures how easily a user can find your website without paid ads.

Traditionally, organic visibility has been measured against a standard search engine results page (SERP) of 10 blue links, but today’s SERPs are much more dynamic.

In addition to 10 blue links, knowledge panels, local packs, featured snippets, and many other SERP features must be considered when calculating organic visibility.

The bottom line remains the same, however: the greater your organic visibility, the more customers you will reach.

Rank tracking and analytics tools can be used to track organic visibility.

You can view your total number of impressions over a given time period in Google Search Console to get an idea of your organic visibility.

The impressions represent searches for which your site was visible, regardless of whether they resulted in clicks.

Things to remember when working with SEO KPIs

There are a few things to keep in mind when working with SEO KPIs:

• Remember that SEO is a long-term game. It can take months or even years to see results from your efforts, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see immediate results.
• Focus on quality over quantity. It’s better to have a few high-quality backlinks than a bunch of low-quality ones.
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. While most people use desktop, more and more people are now preferring to use their smartphones and tablets to browse the web. So it’s important that your website is optimized for mobile devices.
• Pay attention to your click-through rate (CTR). This metric measures how often people who see your website in the search results click on it. A high CTR means that your website is relevant and useful for searchers, which will help you improve your ranking over time.

Track your SEO KPIs now

It’s important to start tracking your SEO KPIs as soon as possible, no matter what you decide.

You will be better informed about your current performance and benchmarks if you begin collecting and analyzing data as soon as possible.

Setting and measuring SEO KPIs will help you make smarter, data-driven decisions about your campaigns. The sheer amount of data might be overwhelming for you, and building an accurate strategy will take some time. 

And using more than one tool to analyze them is a hassle. Keep track of all KPIs with SuiteJar, the single tool to streamline all your SEO activities.