SEO KPIs: Which are the most important?
KPIs are objective metrics that help measure the performance of a given organization or campaign.
What are the most important SEO KPIs when it comes to measuring the success of your SEO and digital marketing efforts?
1. Organic Sessions
Organic sessions measure visits to your website from search engines like Google and Bing.
A session is defined by a visit to your website, the actions taken by the user during that visit, and also when the user exits the site.
If a user is inactive, their session will expire after 30 minutes of inactivity by default. A single user can have multiple sessions.
The organic traffic can be measured directly in Google Analytics. Organic traffic growth is undoubtedly one of the most important SEO indicators because it indicates that an increasing number of people are finding your website by searching on search engines.
The percentage ratio of clicks to impressions (CTR) increases with each single position gained on the search engine results page. Going from the 2nd to the 1st results page for a keyword with a high search volume can make a difference for your business.
You can help drive more organic sessions by creating a compelling and relevant page title and writing a meta description with a clear and enticing call to action. Increasing organic sessions indicates that you are ranking high on the major search engines, which is exactly what you hope to achieve with a large-scale SEO campaign.
Digital and traditional marketing efforts, on-page and off-page alike, will help you continue to increase the number of organic sessions.
2. Increase Keyword Rankings
The higher your website ranks for high-volume keywords (terms that are frequently searched for), the better your business will perform.
There are some keywords that you will naturally rank high for, such as your brand name or highly targeted, long-tail keywords specific to the services or products you sell locally.
Keyword rankings are an essential SEO KPI as they measure the effectiveness of your SEO. Keyword ranking improvements are the first step towards achieving other primary goals: more traffic, leads and sales. You should keep a close eye on your keyword rankings.
Fluctuations are normal and Google algorithm updates can cause significant volatility, but in the long run you will see growth. Keep an eye on at least weekly if not daily as a drop in rankings could signal an issue with your site that needs to be addressed.
3. Leads/Conversions
The first two ranking factors are about attracting visitors to your site from search engines, but what action should you take with users once they have landed on your site?
It is essential to place strategic CTAs on-site to generate valuable leads for your business.
A lead is any type of contact with a potential customer. It could be a:
- Subscription to the Newsletter.
- Submission of the contact form to request more information.
- Phone call.
- Registration for a webinar.
- Completed purchase.
An increase in leads not only means that you are attracting more visitors to the site, but those visitors are completing the desired action at an increasingly higher percentage. This is an essential SEO KPI because it is closely related to the core business goal of growing the customer base and increasing sales.
To improve the results of this SEO KPI, focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and user experience (UX).
- Is your website easy to navigate?
- Are the calls to action (CTAs) prominent and clear?
- Is the content reliable and persuasive?
- Can the user move through the conversion funnel in easy and expected ways?
4. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of sessions in which the user loads the page and immediately exits without taking any action.
Bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of non-interactive sessions by the total number of sessions.
A typical bounce rate is between 40 and 60 percent, which means that about half of all sessions should end without any action being taken. But this will vary greatly depending on your industry/niche.
Bounce rate is an important SEO KPI for algorithms because it measures how happy a landing page is for the user, given a given search query.
When a user searches for a keyword, Google wants to show them the most relevant, highest-quality results possible that solve their problem. When users return to the search results page, it can indicate that the ranking page is not relevant, frustrating to navigate, or may not be trustworthy.
On the other end of the spectrum, a low bounce rate indicates that your site is relevant, easy/rewarding to navigate, and meets a minimum E-A-T threshold. Regularly review your site’s pages with a high bounce rate and A/B test different approaches to see if you can improve that number.
5. Pages/Session
Pages per session is a simple metric that measures, on average, how many pages users visit during a session. It also counts repeat views of a single page.
What is a strong pages/session metric? It will depend on the depth of your site architecture and the complexity of your conversion funnel. If you have a one-page website, 1 page per session is perfect.
If you have a content-heavy site focused on informing the user or an e-commerce site where users typically view multiple products and go through a multi-step checkout process, you will see many more pages per session on average.
As with other metrics that track user behavior, pages per session is an important SEO KPI because it indicates the value/quality of your site and how users are navigating it.
However, having a user visit 100 pages isn’t truly valuable unless you’re setting them up for a conversion now or later. Make sure you have prominent and clear CTAs, even on deep internal pages, to direct users deeper into your conversion funnel.
6. Average Session Duration
Session duration measures the average length of a visit to your website.
The more in-depth your site’s content and structure, the longer it should last.
Session duration is an important SEO KPI because it indicates the quality of your site’s content and how much users are incentivized to stay, read, and click deeper into your site’s architecture.
If you notice a drop in session duration, you probably made some changes that didn’t deliver the results you were hoping for.
Continue to focus on implementing clear, conspicuous CTAs to convert this captive audience into a lead or customer.
7. Page Load Time
We haven’t talked about it yet, but page load time contributes to most of the metrics we’ve discussed so far.
Think about how you behave as a user browsing the internet. If a site takes a long time to load, you’re more likely to return to the search results page. If a site is very slow to load, you’re less likely to explore deeper into the site. You’re also likely less likely to convert because your first interaction with this company was frustrating.
Your ideal page load time will vary based on the complexity of your content and the patience of your user, but most users will abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
With every additional second of loading, expect your bounce rate to increase accordingly.
In fact, a page that takes 5 seconds to load is 90 percent more likely to bounce than a page that loads in one second. Use a tool like GTMetrix to get insights into your site’s loading times and get recommendations for optimizations you can make to your server, code, content, or images to improve your load time.
Every time you take an action on your website, whether it’s redesigning a page layout or uploading a new image, consider overall site speed.
8. Top Exit Pages
An exit page is the last page a user visits before they end their session, close their tab or browser, or browse to a new website.
Even though people are leaving your website, an exit page isn’t inherently bad: a user can exit on the thank you page or the purchase confirmation page, with a fully satisfied experience.
However, if a high percentage of users are exiting on a page where you don’t intend for them to end their journey, it could mean they’re opportunities for CRO/UX improvements.
You can find these details in Google Analytics by going to Behavior Reporting > Site Content > Exit pages.
We recommend that you evaluate not only the raw number of exits, but also the exit rate. This is a percentage calculated by dividing the number of exits by the number of pageviews for a given page.
If you have a high exit rate for a page that is not intended to be an exit page, optimizations are needed.
9. Crawl Errors
Googlebot and other crawlers need to be able to fully view and access your site’s content to assess its value and relevance.
If your site has crawl errors, it means that Googlebot is having trouble accessing your site or reading your content. Crawl errors can be found in Google Search Console. You can test crawling a page at any time by using the “Fetch as Google” tool in Search Console and selecting the “fetch and display” option.
Crawl errors can be related to server failure, if Googlebot can’t communicate with the DNS server, the request times out, or your site is down. Crawl errors can also be at the URL level, if a particular page no longer exists or has a long redirect chain.
If you experience a spike in crawl errors, we recommend taking immediate action, especially if the crawl errors are at the server level or if the URL errors affect key pages.
Conclusion
Focusing on these nine SEO KPIs will ensure that your website gets a predominant visibility on search engines. If you need professional SEO advice, you can contact us by clicking here.
