Although many companies, blogs, and freelancers have different goals regarding search engine optimization, there are some common goals that almost all of them want to achieve. To measure these goals, companies usually implement SEO KPIs. Because without metrics, you have no chance to find out if your search engine optimization has done anything — and what exactly.
Table of Contents:
7. Backlinks & referring Domains
What is a KPI?
KPI is short for "Key Performance Indicator." The main objective of KPIs is to measure data that is valuable to the company to evaluate how successfully these key objectives are performing.
To track the performance of their business goals, companies use numerous KPIs. Then, based on the resulting data, they adjust their strategies to achieve even better KPIs.
Without SEO KPIs, you can't measure your SEO success. Only with KPIs can you track your SEO work in the long and short term and act according to the data. These are 8 of the most common SEO KPIs:
1. Organic Traffic:
Organic traffic measures a website's visits through organic search results. As expected, one of the main goals of any SEO strategy is to get more traffic from organic searches. After all, more traffic means more people are getting to know your products or services.
| Tracking organic traffic (and any traffic source) is very simple once you have linked your website to a web analysis tool such as Google Analytics and set up your account. |
Once you are logged into your Google Analytics account, go to
Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels> Organic Search.
With these settings, you can track your organic traffic for your preferred period and set up KPIs based on your traffic goals.
There are three typical time intervals to evaluate traffic (and other KPIs):
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Weekly data: |
During this period, check the impact of significant changes on the performance of your website, such as the launch of a marketing campaign. |
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Monthly data: |
Check the effects of SEO measures in the monthly overview. SEO measures need time to develop their full effect. |
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Annual data: |
During this period, you can best assess how your campaigns and SEO performance are performing in the long run. |
Do you want to look at your traffic in a different time frame? Just click in the upper right corner of your traffic report in Google Analytics and change your desired time frame.
2. Keyword Ranking
Another classic SEO KPI is rankings for keywords important to your business. The higher pages rank for a relevant keyword in search engines, the more relevant traffic will be likely.
If your off-page and on-page SEO are done correctly (and include keyword research and keyword-optimized pages), keyword rankings should eventually improve. Different types of keywords are essential to increase traffic for your business.
| Use XOVI NOW to check your website's rankings and track essential keywords quickly. |
3. Visibility
Visibility (also called search (Engine) VisibilityorSEO Visibility)is a popular SEO metric. It's an index to measure and compare the SEO performance of domains. Put simply, it describes how well users can find a website in search engines.
XOVI NOW calculates a website's Visibility score based on its rankings for 500.000 predefined keywords covering various industries, such as retail, travel, finance, insurance, education, health, and more.
In XOVI NOW, Visibility is an open-ended metric. There is no predefined good or bad score. Instead, compare it to your competitors' Visibility scores and check where you stand compared to them. If your Visibility is higher than theirs—that's a good score.
| To learn more about Visibility, how to use it, and improve your Visibility score, we recommend you check out our comprehensive Visibility guide. |
4. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate reflects the percentage of visitors who visited only a single page of your website and then left.
By tracking your bounce rate, you can better understand how optimized your website's design and content are.
Bounce rate is a great metric to measure user engagement on your website. For example, a low bounce rate would indicate that your website is relevant to the user.
Interpret bounce rates correctly
Bounce rates differ depending on the type of content. For example, blogs, news, or event pages usually have higher bounce rates because users find the information they are looking for directly on the first page and do not have to switch to other pages (such as a shopping cart or an order process). So high bounce rates are not alarming per se.
However, if your online store has a high bounce rate, users are not browsing for products or buying any. Ideally, users should be redirected to a well-optimized Thank You page after a conversion on a landing page. So a low bounce rate is ultimately what you want in an online store.
Therefore, to properly assess your bounce rate (whether it's good or bad, high or low), it's crucial to understand typical user behavior regarding this particular type of content.
Generally, a page with a bounce rate between 41% and 55% is considered average. It is considered above average if it is between 56% and 70%. Anything that exceeds 70% should be urgently improved.
The easiest way to determine your bounce rates is with Google Analytics. Bounce rate is a measure that is usually included in most Google Analytics reports. For example, if you want to see the bounce rate of each of your pages, go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages.
In this report, you can find the measurement data for each page of your website. To identify the pages with the highest bounce rates, you can sort them by bounce rate. This means that the data displayed in Google Analytics is now listed in descending order by bounce rate rather than page views, as in this case.
To sort the column by bounce rate, click at the top of the column that says bounce rate.
5. Page Speed
Page speed is the time it takes to display a requested URL on a device's screen completely and functionally. Page speed is one of the most critical factors for a good user experience. It is also an important ranking factor for Google, especially for mobile search.
| In your weekly Site Audit, XOVI NOW analyzes your site's page speed. If any issues turn up, we'll create a task for you in the Advisor. |
If a URL loads too slowly, users become impatient and quickly return to search results to click on the next hit: If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, the bounce rate (the number of users who leave the page again) is already a whopping 40%.
In addition, a large website with a slow page speed can experience crawling issues.
| Use the Google PageSpeed Tool to get an overview of how fast your website is. The tool provides a page speed score and shows issues and tips to solve them. |
| The Pingdom Website Speed Tool also provides good insights into how to optimize your site for better page speed. |
6. Crawl Errors
Crawl errors occur when search engine bots cannot capture a page of your website for some reason. Crawl errors are typically divided into page errors (DNS or server errors) and URL errors (usually 404 errors).
Crawl errors can be identified in the Google Search Console. Setting up the Google Search Console is quick and essential for successful SEO.
To identify crawl errors on your website, go to Index > Coverage.
In this report, you will find all the errors and warnings on your website. If you scroll down, you will see a list of all pages with crawling problems. You will also get suggestions on how to fix the problem.
7. Backlinks & Referring Domains
Backlinks are links that point to your website from another website. Backlinks are considered one of the most critical SEO factors for high search engine rankings.
Backlinks are a way for search engines to understand the importance of a page. Their assumption: If many websites are linking to your website, the content on your website must be helpful for the user. The search engine assigns a higher ranking to this website in the result pages (SERPs).
The evaluation of backlinks has developed over the last few years. Nowadays, search engines compare the content of websites in terms of their relevance to each other and then weigh the existing backlinks accordingly.
Imagine, an online shop selling products for gardening. Now, if they link to someone else's gardening blog, there is a high overlap of topics. This is because the blog offers added value to online shop's users and —possibly — vice versa. But if a gambling website links to said gardening website and does so frequently, there is no obvious reason a webmaster would do so except for money. For this reason, search engines like Google distinguish between low and high-quality backlinks.
Tracking and evaluating backlinks as an SEO KPI is an excellent strategy to understand how the relevance of your website grows over time.
8. Organic Leads & Conversion
The last KPI we'll talk about is the main goal for any business. It's great that we increase the other KPIs, but our ultimate goal is to increase our leads and conversions.
Leads are initial contacts between a new, potential customer and a company. These are usually personal data that the user has left behind. By voluntarily passing on their data, the user signals an increased interest in your company and your offers. He is, therefore, an interested party.
A conversion turns the interested party into a customer. This does not necessarily have to be a product or service purchase. A conversion can also be the registration for the newsletter or submitting a contact form.
Companies define their leads and conversions individually based on their business goals. Therefore, what is a lead for some may already be a conversion for others.
The best way to track leads and conversions over time is to set goals with Google Analytics.
Conclusion
With these SEO KPIs in mind, you should be able to measure the performance of your website. This will give you the data you need to improve your website and its SEO performance. Again, Google Analytics and a good SEO tool can help you with this.
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