The Most Important SEO KPIs You Should Be Tracking - Semalt

Can you say with all certainty that your SEO strategy is effective? If not, you should head over to Semalt for a do-over. How can we ensure your efforts in building a tangible website doesn't go to waste? One way to do that is by developing your website's performance. By keeping our eyes on the right performance results, we know what areas of your website need the most attention or repair. 

By tracking all the right performance metrics, we can answer the questions you may have concerning your website.

KPIs are used as objective metrics that measure and give a clear representation of the success of a given website or content campaign. 

Your website is great, amazing, and beautiful. You've also spent a good amount of money in your content marketing campaign, many sleepless nights developing buyer personas, and gaining on your target audience. The moment has finally come for you to present your hard work to your clients, but it is a website, and it will be challenging to show whether your effort is a success or a waste. You do this by using KPIs. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are values used by a website's marketing team to measure their website's performance concerning organic search results. As a website, SEO is the primary objective and the core function of every website. For a website or a website's marketing team to understand how well their site performs on search engines, they must measure SEO metrics. By doing this over a couple of weeks or months, they can track changes and perform analysis to determine the most visited or top-performing pages, top keywords, and areas of a website that fail to get optimized.  

However, are there KPIs that are vital in the determination of the success of your SEO and digital marketing efforts? Here are four critical KPIs you should keep in mind. 

Organic sessions measure the amount of earned traffic or clicks to your website from search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A session is defined when a user visits a website and the user's actions during such a visit. It also involves the exit of the user. If a user remains idle during the visit, their session will become inactive by default after 30 minutes.

Note: One user can be responsible for multiple sessions. 

Organic traffic can be measured using google analytics, or you can integrate the data with reporting tools to better cross analyze your data with other data points. 

An improvement in organic traffic is often a good indicator of performance growth because it indicates that your SEO objectives are being achieved. In simple terms, you are getting seen by an increasing amount of internet users.

Monitoring organic sessions as a KPI has potential because it can be pinpointed by digging into your analytic data and keyword positions. This is of great advantage because it can mean more than branded searches. You can see clearly whether or not your marketing efforts pay off with increased brand awareness. You will also notice that your website will improve the ranking for keywords.

Click through rates will also increase with an improved position on SERP. Moving from the third page to the first is likely to affect the number of CTRs your website begins to experience.

You can achieve this thanks to a combination of high volume keywords and crafting compelling and relevant page titles. You can also write a meta description with an attractive call to action. 

By growing your organic sessions, it indicates that you are of more value to your viewers and the search engine, which is your main aim of having a website.  

Your keyword ranking is your keywords are positioned in search engines such as Google. A high-ranking keyword means a keyword that is very relevant and is searched by a large number of internet users. 

This means the greater the number of high ranking keywords, the better. Several tools have been developed to help you check and track your keyword ranking. For example, you can use SEMRush or SE Ranking. 

Some words naturally rank high in SERP. Some of these words include brand names or highly targeted long-tail keywords that are specific to the service you offer and your location.

Your keyword ranking is important to KPI because its what website owners look out for in determining the success of a website. As a website owner, you may not know to look out for dwell time, click-through rates, or any of those things. Instead, you look out for the easiest indicator, which is keywords. Website owners also monitor keywords because they are the first step a website needs to take to achieve the primary goals, which are: more traffic, leads, and sales.  

Note: you must keep a close eye on your keyword ranking.

However, it would help if you didn't get worried when you notice a fluctuation in your keyword ranking. This occurs because Google has updated their algorithm, but if the decline continues, you should have it checked. Otherwise, you should experience steady growth after a while.

Monitoring your website regularly helps you correct mistakes before they have a chance of becoming dangerous. But you shouldn't overdo your optimization because over-optimization is just as bad as under optimization.

Your on and off-page optimization will help your keyword rankings improve and other SEO factors that enable your website rank.  

After putting in efforts to get views to your site, what happens next? Answering this question is critical if you want to make the most of the internet. Once a visitor has opened or visited your website, what next? Your SEO strategy generates leads that you hope will get converted to customers. Leads are potential customers by conversion; we refer to the process of convincing them to patronize your website. 

The lead contact can come in the form of:

You can analyze and track your lead activities. Thanks to tools such as Google Analytics, you can keep an eye on information such as: 

You can also set up milestones or markers that indicate where leads drop off. With this data, you can make improvements on your websites and stop leads from losing interest in your website. By increasing the number of your leads, you not only draw more visitors to your website, but you also enjoy more sales as a result. This will mean that more of your visitors achieve or perform the end or final task you hope to perform.

This is an essential KPI because it relates closely to your business objective. Regardless of how great your website is, if it is unable to get leads to convert, your business and website will lack the resources to grow. To ensure this doesn't happen, you should focus on improving your click-through rate optimization and user experience. 

The longer a visitor stays on your website, the better your chances of getting ranked. This is because internet users wouldn't stay on your website if you aren't meeting their needs the way they like. Page per session is a metric that gives an average on how many pages a visitor visits during a visit session. It also calculates how often a page is revisited. 

Thanks to in-depth link building sequence or structure, it is possible for one website to keep a single user for long periods, which is a good thing, and here is why. Page per session allow SEO experts or web designers to create content that users may find interesting. These contents are also related so that after reading one article, readers are convinced to go to the next as it contains relevant and related content to what they just finished viewing.  

Think of a page per session as a chain; they search for a specific product or content. Still, after answering their primary request, you can provide more information on a closely related product or content that makes the reader think, "why don't I check this out also?" by doing this, you'll experience more pages per session on average. 

These KPIs are important in keeping your marketing efforts alive. Semalt helps you keep track of these KPIs and more to keep your website efforts alive and take it to the first page of SERP. For any marketing team to truly understand the performance of a website, you will need to measure certain SEO metrics. The question is not whether you need us to measure your KPI metrics, but how much your website is suffering because you haven't been keeping track of these metrics.