Introduction
For digital marketing, and more specifically search engine optimization (or SEO performance), many key performance indicators need to be tracked to see if SEO efforts are worth the time spent on content marketing.
It’s no secret that SEO takes time to provide results and returns, but by generating KPIs, you’ll be able to demonstrate the performance of your strategy.
Understanding your SEO ROI isn’t simple, and even experienced marketers might fall into the trap of writing content out of habit rather than conviction over time. Knowing what an SEO tool is and how to use it successfully is a great start, but you’ll also need to know how to measure the success of your efforts. This is where KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) play a factor.
What is KPI (Key Performance Indicator) & Why Use It?
A key performance indicator (KPI) for SEO is a measurement that marketers use to examine the effectiveness of their optimization strategy.
KPIs can mean a variety of things; for example, average session duration and bounce rate can help SEOs analyze how well a page’s content responds to a visitor’s questions.
KPI metrics are used for examining the effectiveness of any marketing strategy. Howcome, it would not be necessary? It provides the exact ratio of the efforts and obtained results.
Monitoring the right KPIs is important to keep track of progress. And to know if the SEO efforts you made are directly impacting your revenue and profits or not, the return needs to be checked.
We’ve put up a list of the top SEO KPIs to constantly check on to keep your business moving correctly. There are three types of metrics to consider: visibility, conversion, and ranking. Here’s what they all imply and how to stay on top of them.
The necessary Key Performance Indicators for SEO are:
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Visibility Metrics
Visibility analytics show you how many people are looking at your content at a given time. They’re essential in determining if your content is being promoted effectively and is being clicked on.
If these analyses fall short of your targets, you’ll want to think about how you might get your content in front of more visitors. Starting a newsletter, for example, could help customers inform about fresh blogs your team has published regularly.
You might also use sponsored channels to attract more visitors to your sites, such as Google Search advertisements or retargeting ads.
Organic Traffic
It represents the number of visitors that reach your website through organic keywords. You can isolate this organic traffic using Google Analysis.
You should also look at your other traffic sources, including referrals, paid search, and social media, because all of these activities work together to boost engagement and boost your SERP rankings.
Impressions
Using Google Search Console’s Search Results report, you can simply track impressions on your pages. The overall number of impressions tells you how many people viewed your pages and had the chance to click on them, irrespective of whether or not they did.
You can dig further into the search queries that produced the most impressions with Search Console. To enhance your reach, you can adjust your keyword strategy, advertisements, and other distribution methods.
Top Pages
This KPI helps in identifying which of your pages gets the most clicks and why is important. Go to Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages to find your most visited pages.
Alternatively, in Google Analytics, click “Content Drilldown” for a more organized view of your top pages. Consider this: do only a few of your pages account for 90% of all organic traffic?
Which of your pages attracts your visitors the most? Which pages could be modified to boost interaction and provide more value? This filters the pages that bring in the most traffic.
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Ranking Metrics
The ranking metrics indicate if your SEO tactics are paying off, and suggest improvements accordingly. To get it properly, many of these indicators require more time, consistency, and testing.
Each of these indicators, on the other hand, is important for understanding how Google evaluates your site in comparison to other domains in your industry.
They indicate if Google thinks you’re worthy of a first-page ranking and what you can do to boost your odds.
First-page keyword rankings
Because 75% of internet users rarely scroll past the first page of search results, many SEO practitioners consider first-page status to be the most essential factor.
Using a reliable keyword research tool, check your rankings. See which of your pages appear in the top ten and which are on the edge of ranking.
You might be shocked to learn that one of your sites performs highly for a dozen keywords
you didn’t expect to target, some of which would be worth expanding on in your ads or blog material.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority was created by “Moz” as a way to offer a cumulative “grade” to your webpage on its ability to compete with other websites for SERP ranking.
SEO marketers have widely adopted Domain Authority as a standard feature of the SEO strategy-building process because it is a free tool. hire a dedicated SEO team to explore the benefits of SEO for your business.
The number of backlinks your domain receives and the engagement your content receives have such a big impact on its DA. You’re less likely to rank higher than your competition if you have a low score.
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the top-ranking factors of Google. These are links to your web pages that are put on other sites that essentially tell Google that your content is worthy to share.
The link metrics that you should keep track of are the total number of backlinks, total number of referring domains, number of links earned, and toxic links.
Toxic backlinks from non-credible or spammy sources can reflect poorly on your site and hence you should remove them once tracked.
Content Relevancy Score
The fact that your content includes a specific keyword doesn’t fulfill the point of relevancy to the target topic. The content relevancy score is calculated based on the feedback of the users.
The higher the positive feedback higher the content relevancy score. Your content relevancy score shows you whether Google thinks your page is contextually relevant. This can be checked based on the keywords you mention, and by comparing with other web pages in top–ranking results.
So if you want to increase your content relevancy score, you need to learn briefly about SEO-friendly content writing tips that would be helpful for your SEO efforts.
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Conversion Metrics
These are the most important KPIs of all metrics that help in understanding how effective your content has been in bringing in real deals. And this is what you need as a result of all your SEO strategies work.
Unless your use the conversion indicators it is impossible to track how your SEO efforts are helping to bring in deals. Once you get the details of demo signups, newsletter signups, and other data, you have this idea of dropping the point of visitors.
Clicks
Google Search Console does a lot of jobs as the clicks are found in the search results. It keeps track of how many impressions are turned into clicks.
And if the number of clicks tends to be lower, you can make changes in the meta title, meta description, and the content relevance resulting in a significant jump in clicks.
Bounce Rate
A bounce rate simply means that your landing page is not engaging or relevant to visitors and so incapable of turning traffic into conversions. This KPI tracks the bounces audience.
You can check the bounce rate of web pages in Google Analytics under Behavior → Site Content → All Pages.
Average Time on Page
You need to measure the duration of the user’s average time on your website or pages. The more a user spends time on your page means more engagement and the higher the chances of conversion.
You can track the average time of page indulgence in Google Analytics under Behavior → Site Content → All Pages.
Page Speed
The loading speed of your page can impact heavily on search rankings as well as conversions. Even large file sizes or server that isn’t performing well can be the reason for the slowing speed of pages.
And you can note this by checking the site performance report to see insights on speed. And there are audit tools that use regular crawls to highlight any slow page.
Coverage Issues
Coverage Issues are the crawl errors usually 5xx server errors, 4xx errors, crawl anomalies, noindex pages, blocked by robot.txt.
You can keep an objective of ensuring your indexed pages with minimum errors. You can find them under Index → Coverage in Google Search Console.
Also read, Daily SEO Checklist to boost your website ranking on SERP.
Conclusion
The exact digital marketing KPIs you track will depend on the focus areas of your content strategy. As you choose to SEO strategy to do its part, KPI metrics help to connect the dots between a blog visit and conversion.
Setting SEO KPIs allows you to focus your efforts and track the success of your campaign. Each marketer has its own set of KPIs to track, the truth remains that you should have them in place and be reviewing your site’s performance against them regularly.
The best SEO KPIs tracking only works the best when it is done consistently. Only then does it serves its purpose, rather used by some B2C retailer or an SEO agency.
