• December 14, 2022
• by fsadvertising

Key Performance Indicators(KPI) for SEO are the foundation for a strong business that grows year over year. KPIs are the measurable metrics that can be tracked to gauge performances of various marketing activities. In other words, this will tell you what are the things working well in your SEO and also what is not working. KPIs work as a control system. The most important benefit is by monitoring the right KPIs, you can avoid spending time and money on something that isn’t driving the expected profit. KPIs are situational and are different for different businesses. 

IMPORTANT SEO KPIs FOR ONLINE BUSINESSES

Organic traffic: This KPI measures the number of visitors that visit your website from organic search results. It is one of the most important metrics. The growth of organic traffic lets you know that you have reached the main SEO objective i.e., growing the number of people seeing and visiting your website. If you work with Google Analytics, you can easily track daily searches in your site traffic. You can track organic traffic both to specific pages and to your website as a whole. That will allow you to understand which are the pages that perform better and which need improvement. You can make that possible through keyword research. By identifying which words your website visitors search for the most, you can build better content, refine and measure it.

Page load time: Also called page speed is another KPI which has a huge impact on the SEO performance of a website. It should be checked regularly along with the bounce rate as well, as the percentage of visitors who navigate away from a particular website after viewing only one page is unhealthy for the business. So with regular checks, both the page load time and bounce rate should be reduced as the increase only affects your search ranking. It is a fact that the more time the page takes to load, the higher the chance for the visitors to navigate away from that page. 

Search ranking: One of the main goals of the websites is to get featured on the very first page of the search engines. The higher your content ranks, the more chances of your brand to reach more people. This not only increases your traffic but also pulls up the conversion rate both in terms of sales and leads. There are many factors that can affect your search ranking like, page load time, bounce rate, click-through-rate, relevant content, usage of keywords and your website's domain authority. 

Average session duration: Average session duration is the metric which informs you how long, on an average, visitors spend browsing your website. It is a good indicator of how effective and relevant your content is. The average session duration will depend on your sitemap. The more relevant your content and site structure, the longer you can expect this duration to be. There are plenty of ways you can increase the session duration and keep your visitors hooked on your site. You can create text with images and videos, formatting your content so that it becomes easier to read and link them to other pages of your site. But always publish content that’s worth reading in the first place. The growth might be slower, but always remember that quality overpowers quantity.

Average organic CTR: Organic CTR is a metric to measure the frequency of user clicks on your website when it appears on search results. To be very specific, it is the total number of clicks on your search result, divided by the total number of impressions in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher that number is, the better. It shows how effective and relevant your copy is in terms of title tag and meta description. It also tells you whether it matches with what the user is searching for with the keywords.

Bounce rate: Bounce rate is a metric that shows you how many visitors navigated away from your website or an individual page, without reacting to call-to-action on your website. It is expressed as a total percentage of visitors who left without interacting. Your website may derive a lot of its traffic from organic search, but if many of those visitors stay on your website for not even 4 seconds and leave instantly, you won’t see more conversions, even if the organic traffic comes after your visibility on the very first page of Google. The average bounce rate can range anywhere between 30 and 60 percent depending on the industry, with the most common reasons being slow page load speed, many ads or poor website design. 

We have outlined a few of the most important KPIs and so we hope you’ve gained a greater insight into how you can improve your SEO marketing strategy with the help of these metrics. While you may choose one particular metric to focus on, it’s important that you track it in combination with other KPIs.