As those who work in the marketing and communications sector know well, since the first introduction of SEO for search engines , the way of working has totally changed and today, going back is unthinkable.
Among communication strategies, SEO is not the only one, however, professional marketers have found themselves carrying out important KPI analyses, i.e. those relating to key performance indicators, which have proved useful for understanding the general trend of their business.
In order to keep track of successes, marketers must perform an SEO KPI analysis based on important elements such as organic traffic, MRR metrics, click-through rate, cost per acquisition, return on advertising spend analysis and many others.
Why it is essential to monitor KPIs correctly
KPIs , first of all, are used to monitor the progress of the advertising campaign and to be sure that it is a success and not a mere and useless cost. It is intuitive that to implement an effective SEO strategy , KPIs and objectives should play a fundamental role and despite this, they are often overlooked.
SEO needs time to give results and returns in an economic sense, however, by setting the Key performance Indicators we will be able to have the numbers needed to demonstrate that the strategy is going in the right direction.
To do this, however, we also need to know what to measure and what are the most relevant KPIs in SEO campaigns .
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The main SEO KPIs to keep under control
There are many SEO KPIs to monitor, among the most relevant we have:
ROI
Organic Conversions
Organic Visibility and Sessions
Branded and non-branded traffic
Keywords and organic search
Backlink
Organic CTR
Average time on page
Page speed
Through these KPIs we can get an idea of whether our efforts are actually being rewarded, we will realize what impact our work is having on users and finally, we will be able to intervene promptly in the event that problems of various kinds arise.
1. Return on Investment (ROI)
As a rule, the goal of a company that implements an SEO strategy is to generate a return on investment , also called ROI, which consists of realizing whether we are earning more than we spent or not.
To detect this data, however, it takes at least 6 to 12 months . After that, through reports, ROI tracking will tell us if our performance is achieving success with respect to the set objective .
2. Organic Conversions
However, we cannot rely solely on ROI, so another KPI tool is to measure organic lead conversions , sales, or both: this will allow us to monitor potential progress.
Before starting an advertising campaign, it is necessary to set the goal of the conversions that we want to achieve, otherwise we will not have a term of comparison to measure the growth.
We can do this by taking the average of the conversions generated in the 3 months before the campaign. For example, using Google Analytics you can easily measure the conversions of the leads, instead, if you have an e-commerce you can use the internal reports of the tool used (e.g. Shopify, WooCommerce…).
3. Visibility and organic sessions
Another useful KPI to monitor is the organic visibility and growth of our website. This can be identified by the number of impressions in search results for which we will be visible even without users having clicked.
The number of impressions is given by all the keywords positioned, even those that are not yet able to generate traffic: using a tool like Google Search Console we will take note of the organic visibility to monitor the continuous growth and optimize them.
Another effective tool for showing organic visibility based on keywords is SEMrush ‘s ” Organic Research” feature , which allows you to observe how your site’s visibility changes in relation to all indexed keywords.
Organic sessions , which are well measured with Google Analytics, go hand in hand with increasing organic impression growth and when SEO strategy starts to show results, we will see it in traffic.
Organic impressions will generate traffic which, in turn, will turn into user conversions and organic sessions will become the focal point where we will notice SEO ROI optimization .
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4. Branded and non-branded traffic
A key measure of the progression of our strategy is the change in the percentage share that non-branded traffic is getting to our site.
Often, branded traffic is linked to email resource knowledge of a company or the recommendation of a user who, for example, may have seen a campaign or an ad on social media ar numbers and therefore already knows the company: in this case we are not dealing with traffic due exclusively to SEO.
On the contrary, non-branded traffic comes from users who search for specific services or products using keywords and who certainly did not know the brand before seeing it in the SERP.
5. Keywords and organic search
While tracking keyword positioning is less important today, it is actually necessary to keep an eye on the SERP : while years ago keyword positioning was considered the main metric for implementing a good SEO campaign, today this is no longer the case due to semantic search .
Currently, a page can also rank for hundreds or thousands of different keywords which, to be monitored in the SERP, require the use of a very useful tool such as “Tracking” , which we find in SEMrush.
Organic Search KPI Elements
Organic traffic is probably the most relevant metric when we want to monitor the progress of SEO, although it is not the only one to monitor: as we have had the opportunity to mention several times, to have a complete vision it is necessary to take into account other important KPIs.
A single metric will never be enough to obtain realistic data: taking into account only organic traffic, for example, could indicate that this is giving excellent results, but in the meantime we could lose sight of other important factors such as the quality of users who browse our site, the consequent registrations and the fact that leads do not correspond to sessions.
Among the components to monitor together with organic traffic, it can be useful to measure the MRR , or monthly recurring revenue. These concern the data inherent to organic research, purchases, sales or even the percentage of chats that will convert into customers through the same organic search.
Monitoring organic traffic, user registration, and content leads and making sure all three are going in the same direction will help us understand if we are doing a good job in terms of whether we will get the type of traffic we want.
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6. Backlink
Backlinks are part of Google’s ranking factors and it is important to know their number and perform Backlink analyses using tools such as SEMrush’s “Backlink Audit” or Search Console, without forgetting to compare this data with that of your competitors.
To build a link building strategy , it is essential to have data on what you have in terms of backlinks and referring domains to evaluate the tactics to adopt to increase their number.
7. Organic CTR
Organic CTR is another ranking factor and the better it is, the more users will end up clicking on our site in the SERP: it is a metric that shows how many people click after searching and activating an impression.
It is an important KPI to establish the relevance of our meta description and title tag based on user queries : to analyze it we can rely on Google Search Console by going to the Performance report.
8. Average time on page
With Google Analytics we can monitor the average time a user spends on our page, as it helps us understand the real involvement of the user: if the user immediately abandons the page, it is clear that we need to make changes, while, vice versa, we will have excellent chances of converting them.
9. Site speed (pagespeed)
Site speed is very important for conversions, because if a page is slow, we will most likely end up losing leads.
Let’s remember, for example, that large files can slow down the scrolling of pages and relying on a tool like “Site Audit” by SEMrush will allow us to scan them regularly, highlighting which ones are slow and intervene in time.
Through the site audit you can also analyze the presence of potential issues affecting the site coverage and for example detect 4xx errors, 5xx server errors, duplicate URLs and much more.
It is therefore a tool that will help us detect, correct and decrease errors on the site, in order to make the pages indexed and faster.
Search KPIs (paid)
CPC and Click-Through Rate
Among the paid search KPIs we have the cost per click ( CPC ), which in fact provides a cost for each single click that users will perform on our ad.
In CPC we decide how much the maximum price to pay for each click
The cost per click is equivalent to how much we pay on average for a click ad knowing this allows us to set bids operating within the budget we have set ourselves; it is also an aid to understand which matches and keywords to focus on to make bids.
When organic traffic starts to increase and we are not yet sure what the ROI will be, that is, the return on investment we have already talked about, CPC is usually a valid KPI tool to use as a temporary replacement for the average value of organic traffic.
Average cost per click is also useful for spotting gaps in your content strategy.
The click-through rate , on the other hand, is a KPI that indicates the frequency with which users view our ad and click on it: the CTR will help us understand how relevant and effective our advertising text really is in achieving our objectives and if it really corresponds to the intent of the user searching for our keywords.
Cost per acquisition and return on ad spend (ROAS)
Cost per acquisition is a great metric to track spend based on acquisitions: with it we can optimize on a daily basis and understand how much we are spending for each conversion.
