How important is it to report on certain SEO metrics? What should I focus on reporting on?
SEO Key Performance Indicators (or SEO KPIs) are important metrics that measure performance against goals. They include things like bounce rate, time spent on page, number of pages viewed per session, etc.
It is crucial to track certain KPIs over time because they provide valuable insights into your performance. While there are several ways to measure your success, there are KPIs you want to include in order to provide the best, most complete picture of your success.
Reporting correctly using the right KPIs to tell your story is a critical factor that can help you win (or lose) clients and communicate the effectiveness of your strategy to your boss.
Traffic From Organic Search
Google Analytics reports show us that we are getting more and more visits from organic sources every day. We know that our goal is to increase the number of people coming to our website, but what does that mean exactly?
This KPI measures how many visits come to your website from the search engines. It’s one of the most important KPIs to measure because it indicates whether your efforts are paying off. You want to grow the number of organic sessions.
If you work with Google Analytics, you can easily track daily organic sessions in your site traffic. Then, you’ll see how the number of sessions changes in time and learn how it correlates with the overall sessions.
The resulting overview report will show how the number of organic visits changed over time.
Your Search Visibility Overall
Search visibility is one of those metrics that can make or break your online presence. If you’re looking to optimize your website, getting to know this metric could help you determine whether your efforts are working.
Google Search Console provides a tool called “search visibility.” With this tool, you can check how frequently your website appears in search results. You can do this by entering specific keywords into the box above the graph.
The total number of times your website receives traffic each month is referred to as “impressions,” while the percentage of those visits that actually lead to conversions is known as “click-through rate.” A good way to think about search visibility scores is that they represent the ratio of impressions to click-through rate.
With this information, you can use it to gauge the effectiveness of your optimization strategy. For example, if you’re trying to rank highly for a keyword phrase that doesn’t convert well, you might consider dropping some of your paid advertising budget and focusing on improving your organic rankings instead.
Links Back to Your Site
Links are one of the most important metrics for content marketing professionals and SEO experts. They represent the number of incoming connections to your website.
Although, there is no single factor that determines how high a web page ranks in search engines. But, links continue to remain a major factor.
The quality of links is another crucial factor that affects the overall performance of a website. If you want to increase your traffic and conversions, it makes sense to focus on earning links from relevant sites. This way, you will benefit from increased exposure and brand awareness.
But what does “relevant” mean? And how do you know whether a link is good or bad?
Identifying quality link sources is important, because this can mean the difference between whether or not a link is counted in Google’s evaluation of your site.
In general, quality is better than quantity. You can have one or two quality links be responsible for higher rankings, while bigger quantities may result in only a minor improvement.
Your Overall Organic CTR (Click-through Rate)
The term “organic CTR” refers to the percentage of people clicking on your website’s organic listing versus those clicking on paid listings. This is one of the most important metrics for measuring how well your ads are performing.
A low organic CTR indicates that your keywords aren’t converting into sales. You might want to consider revamping your ad copy or reallocating budget. Google says it doesn’t use CTR as a ranking signal.
The truth is, though, that we don’t know exactly what factors influence CTR. There could be dozens of variables at play, including the quality of the content on your page, the type of queries being searched, the number of times someone searches for a term, etc.
To complicate matters even further, Google changes its algorithm frequently, meaning that some of the data used to make determinations about CTR might be outdated.
Still, CTR is useful because it gives us insight into how well our pages perform. If you see that your average CTR is low, you can find out why and take steps to improve it.
How Much Branded Traffic You Are Getting
Branded traffic is the traffic coming from people who are looking for your product/service because they found you via a search engine. This type of traffic is very important for brands who have been around for a while. They have built up trust with their customers, and now they’re trying to convert those visitors into sales.
In many cases, there is no way to tell for certain whether someone came across your brand organically or via a paid ad. But, there are ways to find out. For example, if you use UTM tracking for all of your paid ads, you should not have too much difficulty when it comes to tracking where your branded traffic is coming from when using Google Analytics.
You can also use the same tool to see if your audience is growing or shrinking over time. If you notice a trend, you might want to make changes to your marketing strategy.
What is Your Overall Bounce Rate?
The bounce rate is one of the most important metrics to monitor on your website because it tells us how many people are clicking away from our sites without even looking at them. A low bounce rate usually means that we’re providing great value and our customers are happy with our products. But a high bounce rate could mean that we’ve lost potential customers.
There is really no ideal bounce rate, however, because things can vary. For example, ecommerce stores often have higher bounce rates because they don’t always offer free trials or shipping costs. Other industries like finance, insurance, and real estate might have higher bounce rates since they tend to sell complex products where buyers want more information before making a decision.
If you know why some of your pages are bouncing, you can adjust your strategy accordingly. You can use the “Behavior Flow” section of Google Analytics to find out which pages aren’t converting well. In this case, you’ll want to make sure the landing pages are optimized for conversions and that the product descriptions are compelling enough to keep people engaged.
You can also look into the performance of each individual page to determine whether it’s worth optimizing further. Some pages with high bounce rates might just be missing key things, such as a call-to-action button or a clear pricing structure.
What is the Average Session Duration of Your Visitors?
Session duration metrics tell you how long people actually spend on your site overall—which could include time spent on your homepage, another page, or even multiple pages. If someone spends less than 30 seconds on your site, chances are they didn’t find what they wanted.
The average session duration across desktop devices is around 34 seconds. On mobile devices, however, it drops to just 22 seconds. This difference might seem small, but it’s significant because it indicates whether your site is optimized for the right keywords.
So, if your average session duration is under 30 seconds, you probably have one of two problems:
- You’ve optimized your site for the wrong keywords;
- Your content isn’t interesting, engaging, or useful enough to keep visitors engaged.
To figure out which problem applies to you, start by examining the user journey for insights into how you can improve your site. Then, look closely at the data behind the numbers. Which sessions did people complete successfully? How many times did they bounce off your site? What percentage of those bounced visits resulted in conversions?
What, Exactly, are SEO KPIs?
Search Engine Optimization KPIs are quantitative values used to measure the success of an individual’s SEO efforts and performance within a specific channel. They provide data about how well a particular campaign performed over a certain period of time, such as the number of keywords ranked for each month, the number of unique visitors per day, or the average position for a keyword.
These numbers give marketers a clear picture of what worked and what didn’t work during a given timeframe.
The key metric that every marketer needs to know is “organic traffic,” which measures the amount of traffic that came directly to your site via search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. This includes both paid and unpaid sources.
Organic traffic is critical because it represents the true value of your site and gives you a better understanding of how much money you’re generating from your online presence.
What Are The Benefits of Tracking SEO KPIs?
If you want to optimize your site for search engines, it helps to know what those search engines are looking for. There are many different types of keywords, and each type of keyword carries a different weight. Understanding how much traffic each keyword brings to your site allows you to make better decisions about where to focus your efforts. You might find that one particular keyword brings more visitors than another. If you don’t track your data, you won’t know whether it’s worth investing resources into optimizing for that term.
You also need to understand how well your current SEO strategies are working. Are you getting enough visits from people searching for specific terms? Do you see spikes in searches during certain times of the day? These insights help you identify opportunities to improve your rankings and increase traffic.
Finally, knowing how your competitors perform is essential to staying ahead of the game. By comparing your performance against your peers, you can learn what works best for your audience and gain insight into what changes you need to make to keep up with the competition.
SEO KPIs Allow You to Measure SEO ROI
There are many ways to calculate marketing ROI. Some people prefer to use the “direct cost/revenue ratio” method while others like to use the “cost-per-acquisition” approach. But whatever metric you choose, it helps to know how much money you spend on each campaign. If you don’t have access to accurate data about your campaigns, you might want to consider investing in an SEO dashboard software.
These tools help you keep track of your progress and measure your success. They offer detailed reports, graphs, and charts that show exactly what worked and what didn’t. In addition, you can easily compare different performance indicators across multiple channels such as social media, paid ads, and organic traffic.
For instance, you could look at the number of conversions generated by a specific ad campaign and see whether it increased over time. Or you could analyze the amount spent per lead or sale, and compare it to previous months. This way, you can identify trends and make adjustments accordingly.
They Also Allow You To Identify Improvement Opportunities
Search engines are constantly changing, evolving, and adapting to keep up with how people use technology today. While some changes are beneficial, others can cause problems for businesses trying to make sure that their site is performing well across multiple channels.
If you want to know what’s working and what isn’t, you need to look beyond just the number of keywords that you rank for. You need to understand exactly why those numbers are where they are.
The best place to start is with search analytics tools. These programs allow you to see exactly how your search traffic is performing over time, including conversions and revenue generated. They help you identify opportunities for improvement and pinpoint areas where your marketing campaigns are succeeding and failing.
With SEO KPIs, You Can Also Measure Progress Against Set Goals
The key to successful SEO isn’t just about optimizing a site, it’s about measuring success. If you don’t know how well you’re doing, it’s impossible to make improvements. You need to understand what works and what doesn’t. And you need to know whether those efforts are bringing you closer to achieving your business goals and objectives. In short, you need to measure progress against set goals.
Google Analytics gives you the ability to track visitor behavior across multiple channels, including mobile devices, desktop computers, tablets, and browsers. When you use GA, you’ll see data such as where visitors come from, how long they spend on your site, and what actions they take once they arrive. This helps you identify patterns and trends within your audience, allowing you to target certain audiences and optimize your campaigns accordingly.
You Can Use SEO KPIs to Prioritize Your SEO Efforts
Google Analytics is one of those tools that every marketer needs to use. However, it isn’t always easy to understand how to prioritize efforts within the tool.
While there are many different ways to look at a site’s performance, tracking the right ones is key to determining where to spend your time and effort. If you don’t know the difference between traffic sources and referrers, for example, you might end up spending hours trying to figure out why your bounce rates are high.
To make matters worse, you could be wasting resources on things like AdWords campaigns that aren’t working because you haven’t been tracking conversions properly.
The good news is that once you’ve got a handle on the basics, it’s easier to start looking at more complex issues.
For instance, you’ll want to track conversion paths to see how visitors move around your site. You’ll also want to keep tabs on the success of your social media posts, since these often lead to referrals. In addition, you’ll want to pay attention to your most popular landing pages. These are the places where people go when they reach your site from another source.
Measuring The Efficiency of Your Content
Measuring how efficient your content is is an interesting metric, because it’s about optimizing content not just to rank well in search engines but to achieve company goals for that content and deliver measurable success.
If average content teams create content that reaches 10% of their goals (for example)—10% of their content is successfully published, optimized, and delivered. But what happens to the remaining 90%? How do they know whether their efforts are reaching their goals?
Content efficiency is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy. You can use this data to evaluate your team’s performance against goals, identify opportunities for improvement, and track progress over time.
If you’re looking to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing program, consider implementing a content efficiency dashboard. These dashboards provide simple metrics such as total content published, the percentage of content that reached a goal, and the average cost per piece of content produced.
You can even set up alerts based on specific KPIs. For example, you can receive email notifications whenever your content fails to meet a certain threshold. Or maybe you want to be notified every time your content costs more than $100,000 to create.
Looking at New and Returning Users
New and returning users is a common metric because this is representative of traffic that may lead to actual sales. But, this is not really the best indication of whether somebody is going to buy something.
New and returning users don’t correlate well when it comes to conversion rates. Why? It’s not because there is a magic number of visits leading to a sale. Instead, it’s more because too many variables are involved.
If a product is sold online, then you want to make sure that your landing page is something that will convert people. If you continue to convert, then you can continue selling products to that person.
On the other hand, if you don’t convert people, then you don’t want to bother sending emails or following up later. If 15,000 emails are sent out, and only 500 of them convert to a subscriber, then this is wasted effort.
In addition to ensuring that your landing page actually works, you also have to consider the product’s price, its quality, the email campaign’s timing, the customer purchase cycle, and other attributes. These factors can all add into the final conversion percentage.
It’s easy to examine a number of visits and declare that they represent individual sales. However, it doesn’t always work out that way. It’s rare that it’s an exact 1:1 ratio of effort to sales.
Using Average Time On Site as an Indicator
Average Time On Site seems like one of those KPIs that are a no-brainer when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your content across a variety of webpages.
However, there are actually limits that you need to be aware of so that you aren’t inaccurate with your measurements.
While using average time on site in order to show how much time people spend looking at your content, this does not explain anything about actual engagement.
The average time on site of a visitor has to be justified by data before you can use it as a KPI.
For example, if you use average time on site, you have to exclude bounces. And the problem with this is that it is very specific to certain situations.
So, it’s impossible to use it as a reliable indicator without considering all of the variables for every page, because they can be different from page to page and post to post.
The Right SEO KPIs Help to Improve Your Client’s Understanding of Your Own Efforts
And this is all part of the game of SEO: making sure that your client understands exactly where your efforts stop and their success begins.
Without the correct SEO KPIs, you would be lost without a story to tell. You may have an increase in numbers, but what’s driving the increase in those numbers?
What part of your efforts are driving the success of your optimizations?
The story you tell can mean the difference between a contract renewal and a contract cancellation.
When do you plan on using the right SEO KPIs to tell your own success story?
