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Why SEO kpis are important ?
Did you know that 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search? Day by day, SEO is becoming the primary source of sales for several businesses. 🤯
If you’re one of these businesses, congrats, you’re on the right path!
But are you tracking your SEO performance correctly? 🤨
Get this; watching Google Analytics go up and down or checking for impressions per page via Google Search Console isn’t enough. You need to track several SEO KPIs to know your organic performance.
In this digital marketing era, aligning your business with the SEO best practices can help your business get traffic in the long run.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) KPIs are a set of measurable performance indicators that are used to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO strategies.
Unlike general KPIs, SEO KPIs specifically help you to understand your search marketing performance.
These KPIs generate in-depth insights related to your SERPs ranking, top-performing keywords, conversions, and data-driven recommendations and tell you about the areas that need improvements from an SEO perspective.
But how does tracking SEO KPIs benefit your businesses as a whole?
Although SEO seems to be a lighter term when measuring your business success, the case is otherwise. SEO is the heart and soul of your digital business.
It's the backbone holding together your online promotions, PPC campaigns, organic traffic, leads, and many more aspects of your yearly revenue. Tracking SEO KPIs helps you figure out the following things.
If you invent in SEO, you might expect a return, right? Tracking SEO KPIs allows you to identify whether your SEO efforts directly impact your revenue and profits. To enjoy a good ROI, ensure that your gains from investments are more than the cost of investments.
"You can't improve, what you don't measure," said Peter Drucker, and we feel that.
With the search algorithm being dynamic as hell, it's crucial to measure your search performance metrics. Again, improvements are necessary to stay at the top of the SEO game.
Measuring the right SEO KPIs can help you answer questions like:
🎯 Are your SEO efforts giving you any returns?
🎯 What part of your strategy should you change?
🎯 What resources do you need to do SEO?
Answering these questions can help you shape your KPIs around the optimization strategies in a better way.
Another benefit of measuring SEO KPIs is that it lets you gauge progress against set goals and objectives. Since SEO contributes a fair amount to overall website traffic and leads, your SEO goals must align with your overall business goals.
Just ensure you choose the right SEO KPIs for measurement. Ah! We know searching for KPIs is easier said than done.
So here's a list of the 13 most important SEO metrics you should be tracking side-by-side reading this blog.
Organic traffic refers to the number of people visiting your website via search engines without paying a dime for marketing or promotions.
Measuring organic traffic is important because it's an excellent benchmark for your overall SEO performance. It depicts the traffic you earned from appearing in search results.
It's not that hard to track organic traffic. You can track it by logging into Google Analytics, going to the audience tab, and clicking overview.
Note: Organic traffic is not limited to the overall traffic generated over time. You can segment your traffic based on visitor location, the device used, and pages viewed.
The Click-through rate (CTR) is the total number of people who visited your website or clicked the call-to-action after viewing your pages in search results.
CTR allows you to determine whether your SEO efforts are inclined towards the right audience base or not. It also helps find where you need to optimize your page snippets to encourage users to click your results over those of the competition.
CTR is the number of clicks that your snippet or page receives divided by the number of times they are shown in search results:
For example, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions on a webpage, your CTR would be 5%.
Did you know?
Google Search Console allows you to see the click-through rate of keywords that your site appears for in the SERPs. However, if your Google Search Console is integrated with Google Analytics, you can also view CTRs in Google Analytics.
There're plenty of window shoppers out there!
They see your ad, visit your website, and then leave without purchasing anything (in case of ecommerce stores). Bounce rate helps you identify the number of times people left your website after viewing a particular page.
Instead of being clueless, bounce rate allows you to determine which pages attract visitors and which act as a repellent. It may be in terms of content, design, or if, god may forbid, your website is targeting the wrong audience.
For example, if 100 users visit your website or a particular page (total organic sessions) and 10 of them exit without taking any action (single-page sessions), your website's or landing page's bounce rate is 10%
Note: The lower the bounce rate, the better. If you suffer a high bounce rate from search engines, perform a content audit to find bottlenecks and improvement opportunities.
As we said earlier, measuring return on investment is a crucial metric for any business. Likewise, analyzing the gains made from SEO investments helps you plan your marketing strategy ahead.
The return on investment on your SEO is directly related to the success of your business - earn more than you spend.
ROI on SEO is an everyday talk among marketing managers. And its calculation is pretty straightforward:
A high ROI is better for your company's financial health. Anytime.
Unlike calculating your ROI for paid ad campaigns, ROI on SEO efforts is likely determined by expenses made on in-house SEO teams, SEO tools, analytics tools, and overhead costs.
Load time refers to the time your website or its web pages take to load and become fully functional for users' operations.
Load time is an important SEO metric to measure because it directly impacts the performance of other metrics, such as bounce rate, conversion rate, average page sessions, and more. Plus, your website's load time is directly proportional to the user experience.
You can measure your page load time with the help of Google's PageSpeed Insights. Here, a score > 80 is considered a great loading time, while a score < 49 means your website needs speed optimization immediately.
According to Suddora, a good load time is within 5 seconds or less; anything more than that will eventually lead to a higher bounce rate.
Keyword Ranking is the position your website is ranked in the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) when users search for a particular keyword.
Back in the day, businesses needed only a handful of keywords to gauge their SEO strategy, but today, a single landing page is a home to hundreds of specific keywords. Hence, measuring and analyzing your keyword search ranking is important to improve your SEO game.
There are plenty of free SEO tools that can help keep a check on your target keyword ranking and positions. We prefer Ahrefs to check our keyword ranking for free.
You can refine your search based on device, search engines, or location. Or, if you want deeper insights, you can opt for Google, the software's premium version.
Backlinks are created when external websites link to your website. And when they do so, they are promoting your content in the eyes of search engines.
Link building is an essential aspect of SEO because it benefits your domain authority, thereby enhancing your SERPs. The more backlinks you have, the more popular and credible your site becomes for search engines.
You can use Ahref's free backlink tracker to track the number of backlinks to your website.
Simply enter your domain address and click on Check Backlinks to get the results. Here, we reviewed our numbers, and we got a handsome 1,277 backlinks. 🎉
Conversion rate, or the total number of conversions, is the number of visitors that not only visited your website but also completed a goal. The goal can be as simple as clicking on a CTA (termed as leads) or as complex as purchasing a product (termed sales).
Conversion rate plays a vital role in determining the results of your SEO efforts. It's a tangible way to demonstrate how your website significantly increases its organic conversion rate. Thereby bringing new and more potential leads and customers onboard.
The conversion rate is determined by the overall conversions from email sign-ups, forms, phone calls, direct purchases, and more. Therefore, measuring the average conversion rate over 3-6 months from starting a campaign is recommended to measure growth over time.
The formula for calculating conversion rate is pretty simple:
Pro Tip: It's better to track your website's overall conversion rate and conversions per landing page separately to understand better when, where, and how to improve conversions. Google Analytics allows you to gauge your conversion rate against your set conversion goals.
Average Time on Page is the amount of time a user spends on a particular page of your website. It's believed that the longer a user stays on a page, the more engaged he/she is.
Tracking the average time spent on a page is essential because:
Average time-on-page is a reliable indicator of how a blog or a page would rank in the near future.
For example, even if a blog post ranks at number 10 on SERPs, with an average time-on-page being 4 minutes, the blog is highly-likely to rank in the top 5 SERPs in the coming week or month (because of the high average time).
Here's a proven formula to calculate the time spent by users per page:
So, you must measure the average time on a page, both sitewide and page-level, and work on ways to increase the duration.
You can track this in Google Analytics under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
Branded search volume refers to the organic search results derived when users search for a term that includes your company name, business, or brand. NonBranded search volume, on the other hand, is the number of search results derived from the search of a particular keyword.
In both cases, your website is visible to users in the search results; however, measuring both the searches distinctively gives a broader view of your SEO efforts.
NonBranded content is typically the result of your use of keywords and ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs). Hence, figuring out branded and non-branded search volume can help you identify which channels drive more traffic and which need attention.
You can use Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or Semrush organic research tool to measure the search volume for branded and non-branded content.
But what do you do after you have the data about this SEO KPI?
Quickly create a key performance indicator card on a dashboarding software like Datapad, visualize your search volume numbers with stunning elements, and instantly share them with your team.
Meta Titles refer to the text that is displayed on SERPs to display the topic of a webpage. According to Rank Math, an ideal length of meta titles is between 50-60 characters. It's one of the important ites you should have in your seo checklist.
Though this might sound irrelevant to your business success, a title as good as:
Top 10 Ways to Win The SEO Game If You Own An Ecommerce Store
Will be displayed poorly on SERPs as:
Top 10 Amazing Ways to Win The SEO Game If…
If your target audience doesn't have a clear understanding of the topic you're writing about, do you think they will go ahead and click on it?
There are various ways to measure meta title length for each blog and webpage. You can check your title length from the SEO plugin provided by your hosting provider, or you can use free tools like ToTheWeb or Moz.
To track meta title lengths regularly, you can easily create an SEO KPI card in Datapad.
Things to remember:
"Domain Authority (DA) is a score on a scale from 1-100, where your domain is benchmarked in relative strength to all other domains on the internet," says Tommy Landry.
Domain Authority is directly proportional to your website's traffic, i.e., as DA increases, traffic increases, and vice versa. Tracking domain authority also helps you identify backlink and content marketing performance over time.
You can find the domain authority for your website using Moz. Simply enter your website domain, and Moz will present a complete report based on your website's credibility, keywords, backlinks, and more.
As an example, we researched the domain authority of Amazon.com. Here're the results.
Besides this, Moz also provides page-by-page authority and top linking domains to the website for an in-depth analysis.
Internal links are hyperlinks that you put on your web pages or blogs. These links redirect viewers to another page on your website.
Internal links form a strong bond between your existing pages and tell search engines that your website has highly relevant content. Basically, they are like the "You might also like" widgets for your content-driven website.
Search engines consider one to three internal links hyperlinked to relevant keywords per web page as good. You can curate a list of all your internal links and anchor text to check for pages that drive maximum traffic.
Once done with the listing, you can create an SEO KPI report with Datapad.
Datapad is an easy-to-use KPI dashboarding and reporting software that allows you to create beautiful dashboards and reports within minutes. With the help of Datapad's highly responsive mobile app, you can create, analyze, and track all your SEO metrics on your mobile.
Here’s how you can create an SEO dashboard with Datapad.
Go to our App, sign up, and create a dashboard with Datapad in seconds.
To do so, press the ‘+’ sign on the top right corner. Add Title - SEO Dashboard and other details, click on Create, and it’s done!
Datapad lets you bring your team onboard to track KPIs alongside you. When your business grows with time, so do your SEO KPIs, and it becomes a burden to track them alone.
Especially when you're a CEO with not much knowledge of SEO, you will find it challenging to track them.
So with Datapad, you can bring your marketing team onboard in seconds, hand over the dashboard to them, and they can track all SEO KPIs the way they want.
All you can do is keep an eye out for any unorthodox activity that might happen over time.
After you onboard your team, it’s time to import raw data to Datapad so that you can build KPIs around it and track them flawlessly.
Datapad lets you import data both automatically and manually.
Let’s first see how you can import data automatically via our one-click integrations.
And if you have a comparatively smaller dataset, here’s how you can import data manually with Datapad:
Apart from this, Datapad lets you customize KPI and set goals according to your business.
What's more, you can search for an individual KPI that sits on any dashboard you create on Datapad via our search bar feature and track it immediately. This feature comes in handy when you're short on time but want to track a specific KPI urgently.
So sign up for our free-to-use mobile app (available for both iOS and Android), create high-quality dashboards, and make your SEO campaign streamlined by tracking SEO KPIs from anywhere in the world.
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