10 Most Important SEO KPIs to Track for Optimization Success

When it comes to your website you are going to want to know what SEO KPIs you are going to want to watch since they are the key to your performance and your strategy. Since 2018 around 50% of the online traffic has been dictated by the search engines, which means you need to have an optimized website. There are so many metrics or SEO KPIs that you are going to want to track to stay ahead of your competitors, so here is everything to know about which ones to track and how they are measured.

SEO KPIs to Know

A few of the most important factors for your SEO ranking according to SEMrush’s study include:

• Direct visits to your website
• Time spent on the website
• Pages visited per session
• Bounce rate
• Total number of backlinks
• Total number of referring domains
• Total number of referring IPs
• HTTPS or website security
• Length of content
• Anchor based keywords
• Keywords in body of content
• Density of keywords
• Keyword used in title
• Keyword used in meta data
• Videos on pages

This just shows you that the engagement driven based rankings factors are very critical to your page and it’s ranking. Here are some of the top KPIs for SEO that you are going to want to look at that will measure the progress, effectiveness and performance for your current strategy. Knowing the important ones to track can make a huge difference in SEO for your business.

In Google Analytics

Every single owner of any business needs to be overly familiar with the Google Analytics tool since this is a free tool. However, the majority of owners only use it at the basic level and there are plenty of KPIs that you can track through it, such as:

• Organic traffic and the completion of your goals and conversions

Conversions are just one of the most important KPIs because you can get plenty of visitors, but nothing matters if they don’t end up converting. You can track the completions of your gal by going to the conversions tab > Goals > Overview > Add Segment > Organic traffic > Apply. This would then show you a report where you can see all of the SEO KPIs like goal value, goal completion, goal conversion rates and much more, so you can see your ROI on organic traffic.

A few other things to look at during this time includes not only the conversions, but also the bounce rate and the pathways to the top conversions. The bounce rate will tell you how many visitors are leaving the site after only looking at a single page. This is vital because it can show you the journey of the visitor and that is an indication that something might be wrong with the site.

• Bounce rate

You are going to want to be aware of the exact number of how many people are leaving the website after looking at just one page. This could be because of a wide variety of reasons like copy, content, design or something else entirely. You should make sure that you are checking out the data and then trying to figure out why the users are leaving after looking at a single page.

Most often the top causes of bounces are incoherent meta description copy or ad copy, which leads them to believe the page is about something else only to find it different when they land on the page itself. Make sure to keep the website simple to understand, cohesive and easy to use since this will help to keep users looking at the site and viewing other pages as well.

• Top Bounce pages

You are going to want to know just what pages are causing visitors to leave your website so you can fix it. Make sure that you are in the organic traffic section and then choose Behaviour > Site content > Exit pages and this is where you are going to find the vital information. This will help you to look at these pages carefully and work on fixing them so the visitors are staying and visiting other pages as well.

• Lifetime value of the users

Another KPI that you need to be looking at is  the value of any user based on their performances in their lifetime. To see this you have to go to Audience > Lifetime value and here you are going to be able to view the various metrics. This is going to show you a detailed and informative view of the potential revenue of all customers that are coming through organic searches. This would be accurate if you have entered the full value that you are placing on the customer’s conversion and how many orders you believe they would place with your business.

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In Google Search Console

You also want to know about the other services that are free that you can get from Google, especially those offered to webmasters. These would allow them to check the indexing for the web pages and optimize them better. Here are some of the KPIs that you can find using this tool, such as:

• Total number of all organic clicks

When you are using the search console you can see the reports that will tell you just how many clicks your website got and what search terms were used. This would also help you to see which of your landing pages are generating and bringing in the highest number of clicks as well as the devices that might be sending more traffic to you. You can look at the search volume using a wide variety of filters like Google Trends, Ads campaign and even keyword explorer.

• Report for mobile usability

One thing that you need to keep an eye on carefully is the amount of traffic that you are getting from mobile devices since this has quickly surpassed any desktop traffic. You need to ensure that they are getting the best experience so they will keep coming back to your page. You can find this information in Search Traffic > Mobile Usability and here the report would be shown, which shows any issues that users are facing. It will also show you the URLs that you have that aren’t showing up properly on the mobile device screens and even the accelerated mobile pages.

The accelerated mobile pages is also called AMP and it is one of the most vital KPIs for SEO this year. This helps with your pages loading faster and you can check out the loading speeds of all of your pages by visiting Search Appearance > Accelerated mobile pages and here you can see the URLs that are having issues. Make sure that you are checking this regularly so you can address the issues and see what pages are having severe problems.

• Crawling errors

The crawling errors are one of the most crucial, yet overlooked, SEO KPI ever and you need to see what URLs aren’t accessible by the Googlebot. You can do this by going to Crawl > Crawl errors and then checking out the report of what is listed. The more often you do this, then the easier it is going to be to fix the errors so they can be crawled and indexed by Google.

This is going to help Google cache the various pages that are listed on your website and this can help to increase your ranking. However, if they aren’t indexed, then Google can’t show it to the viewers, so you are going to want to ensure that this is done so you can increase your ranking. If this isn’t completed, then you don’t know how much traffic you are missing out on, so go ahead and check this report regularly.

Other Important SEO KPIs to Know

You are also going to want to know what other SEO KPIs there are to know that aren’t found in the Google console. Here are a few more to consider, such as:

• Target keywords and the organic ranking they hold

This is the most common KPI, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t important and this is where you identify the various main keywords that are sending the majority of the traffic in the direction of your website. You can get to the top of the rankings for your keywords if you are starting with a clear goal, which means creating your content in a manner that will answer the questions of the user. This will help you to rank higher, especially if you were writing the content based on the keywords themselves instead of questions.

• Page Speed

The loading speed of your page became critical back in 2017 and it will continue to be so in the upcoming years. Starting in July 2018 the loading speed of your website started to become a factor in your ranking during mobile searches. Google just wants the users to have only the best experience possible and this means that you need to keep them happy.

Ensure that your page is loading quickly since Google is going to give the websites with the best experiences for the users with a higher ranking. This matters when it comes to your number of conversions as well as the price that you are going to pay when using Google Ads. The faster your website loads, then the more the users and Google will be pleased, so make sure that the site loads quicker than your competitor’s pages.

• Meta data

This is the data that will tell the user about the data that they are going to be clicking on. This is vital for the search engines so they can validate whether or not the content is going to be relevant to what the user is looking for. There are numerous applications for these meta tags and not all of them should be used in the SEO strategies. However, you should ensure that you are using the right length for your page title meta descriptions and it shouldn’t be less than 300 characters.

These are all important KPIs and you are going to want to make sure that you are using them on your website to increase the organic traffic that you are bringing in. Ensure that you are aware of all of these and that they are being implemented on your page if they aren’t already in use.

Make sure that you have your SEO goals set and that you are using these SEO KPIs to help you reach them, which is the first step in being successful. These can help you to figure out how well your website is doing as well as telling you where you would need to improve. Ensure that you are monitoring them on a regular basis so you can see the issues and fix them before they become bigger problems. You can also choose a suitable SEO packages for your performance tracking.