How do you measure SEO success with KPIs?

When running SEO campaigns, there are a few holy grail metrics that we typically look at: 1) YoY% growth in impressions, clicks & revenue from non-branded KWs. We also track quarter over quarter, MoM and biweekly although we know this could just be due to ranking fluctuations 2) # of non-branded KWs ranked in the top 3, top 10 and top 50 spots. We look for total growth over time, esp. YoY and quarter over quarter. 3) # of non-branded KWs ranked in total 4) non-branded KW CTR % over time 5) Avg. KW rankings over time for non-branded KWs

To align SEO success with your business goals and objectives, it's important first to define them. Defining them will help you identify the metrics and KPIs most relevant to your business and enable you to track progress toward achieving those goals. For example, suppose your business goal is to increase revenue. In that case, your SEO objective may be to improve your website's conversion rate, and your KPI may be the number of conversions generated from organic search traffic. Regularly review your KPIs and adjust your SEO strategy to ensure you're on track to meet your business objectives.

In our KPI Tracker template, we start with the following metrics (franchise) with columns for each month and for Goal, Progress, and Progress %: Linking Root Domains - AHREFS SEMRush Tech: - Total Tech Score - Errors - Warnings - Crawlability - HTTPS - International SEO - Site Performance - Internal Linking SEMRush Performance: - Ave Keyword Position - Kwd Market Share - You - Kwd Market Share - Competitor 1-4 (4 rows) Google Analytics & Business Profile: - Website Visits Yelp - Rev Yelp - Calls Google Maps - Directions Google Maps - Website Visits Google Maps - Revenue Google Maps - Visits Organic - Rev Organic

Measuring SEO success with KPIs is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your strategy and making informed decisions about future optimizations. Here's how to do it effectively. 1. Define your goals and align them with KPIs 2. Choose the right metrics for each stage of your SEO strategy 3. Set realistic targets and track progress 4. Analyze and take action 5. Remember, SEO is a long-term game By following these steps and choosing the right KPIs, you can effectively measure your SEO success and make data-driven decisions to propel your website to the top of search engine results.

It's essential to keep in mind that SEO metrics are not universal. The metrics that matter the most for a website will vary based on the specific goals and objectives of the business. For instance, a business that heavily relies on e-commerce sales may give precedence to conversion metrics, while a blog may focus on on-page metrics and content engagement. When deciding on SEO metrics to track, it's crucial to consider the broader context of the website's goals and overall business strategy. By prioritizing the metrics that are most relevant to your business, you can effectively monitor progress and make informed decisions based on data to enhance your website's search engine visibility and performance.

KPIs in SEO will vary from business to business. It's crucial not to follow a blanket blueprint you may have seen online and instead align your SEO efforts to your business objectives. One businesses ambition to drive brand awareness will have different SEO goals than a business that wants to drive leads, downloads, or sales.

Adding more context to choosing SEO KPIs, with examples. Objectives –> Key Results –> KPIs 1. Objective (What): Increase Revenue From SEO 2. Key Result (How): a) Increase relevant organic traffic to the site b) Get more order checkouts 3. SEO Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): i) Organic Traffic ii) Number of orders placed by Organic site visitors Hope this helps.

I’m going to say something controversial. Measuring search engine optimization is like measuring the value of feeding my kids dinner. At some point, things should be done because they are the best way to build a site for the best user experience. In that regard then, treating natural search like any other performance channel just doesn’t work. HOWEVER, you have to know if you implemented your work the right way. You also have to communicate your success in the language of the larger organization. In my opinion, that is how you choose your measure. What problem are you solving. How do you know if you fixed it. The answer to that question is your KPI.

We generally highlight in green the key performance indicators that our clients convey are the most important to them, and then extrapolate them for use in a cleaner monthly presentation. However, we keep the other metrics in place for our own internal monitoring. Here is a link to the tracker template you can build off of: https://bit.ly/kpi-tracker

SEO KPIs help measure the effectiveness of SEO efforts and provide insight into overall business performance. To determine the appropriate KPIs for your business, it's essential to consider the specific goals and objectives of your SEO strategy. For example, if your objective is to increase website traffic, you may choose KPIs such as organic traffic, engagement rate, and session duration as indicators of success. To create effective KPIs, it's necessary to choose SEO metrics that align with your business goals and objectives. By selecting relevant SEO metrics and tracking them over time, you can measure progress and make data-driven decisions

Selecting the appropriate SEO KPI is a vital responsibility of the SEO project manager. As SEO drives top-of-the-funnel organic traffic, it is often further removed from the downstream metrics that the organizations care about. A single metric (True North) may not represent the complete picture. Therefore, incorporating additional Guardrail and Signpost metrics, in conjunction with True North, is essential to depict the correct state of the top-of-the-funnel organic traffic accurately.

Choose a mix of SEO KPIs that demonstrate progress towards your business's goals. These should ideally include a mix of: 1. Macro or primary SEO KPIs - Sales, Revenue, Leads 2. Micro or secondary SEO KPIs - Clicks, Downloads, Time-On-Page, Scroll depth

For a multi-location brand, see the list above and in the tracker link I shard above, and add content segments for each product/service/initiative that's important to the business, such as "restaurant delivery + city" or "pancakes + city". For ecommerce, we'll also want to track content segments, but by product category. For all E-business models, we'll want content segments for upper and lower funnel content. Ours typically includes: * Informational * Transactional Combining these with the services/products segments, we get: * pancakes transactional * pancakes informational Since each will have a different business objective, such as Drive Sales or Attract Links.

When tracking SEO KPIs, it's important to convey the information in a language the rest of the business can understand. Often, reports discuss metrics such as click through rate and vanity metrics that the business may not have an immediate focus on, but the person responsible for SEO may be. Keep reports concise and focus on the highlights that the business can act upon.

A few of the key KPI's used to determine SEO success: Organic Traffic: Indicates how well your strategies are performing in attracting more visitors to your site. Keyword Rankings: Helps you determine if your website is ranking higher or lower for your target keywords, and whether your efforts are improving or declining. CTR: A higher CTR indicates that your website's content is relevant and appealing to searchers. Conversion Rates: Helps you determine if your website is attracting qualified traffic that is more likely to convert. Bounce Rates: Can indicate that your website's content is not engaging or relevant to visitors. Backlinks: Helps you determine if your website is authoritative and trustworthy in the eyes of search engines.

At the leadership level the SEO KPIs will look much different than the day to day SEO managers. Some of the most important SEO KPIs for leadership: - SEO Influenced Revenue - SEO Influenced Pipeline - Leads Generated from Organic Traffic - Close Rate on Leads from Organic Traffic Some of the most important SEO KPIs for SEO managers: - Organic Traffic by page - Click Through Rate by page and query - Keyword rankings by page - Month to month Organic Search Traffic - Leads generated by page (session start) - Pages with the highest exit % - Average Time on Page and/or Average Scroll Depth

We have a very simple process. 1. We look at which spot the content lands in after it's been published. The initial one and after Google's 2-5 month dance. 2. Next we look at the user behavior on this content. Are they staying, signing up for consultation calls etc... For a KPI to be an effective tracking measure it needs to be tied to an outcome that moves the needle for the business. Not something arbitrary as # of visitors.

Often, people rely on SEO tools for guidance in this area. It is absolutely crucial to include human input and contextualise some of the decisions being made. Tools will only get you so far - it is the person/people responsible for doing the work that will achieve true improvement of SEO KPIs.

Eventually, you must connect your SEO KPIs to the financial KPIs of your business. Failing to do so will at best mean the growth of your program and contributions will be stunted.

Successful SEO strategy is an ongoing effort. Effective overall site/SEO audit as an ongoing process is important for continuous improvement to understand the technical issues, overall website performance, site architecture, content improvement, meta tag improvement etc. Keywords research is the most vital, based on the targeted audience to improve or optimize web content accordingly. To achieve the SEO objectives, successful SEO campaign is critical, which is a coordinated effort among concerned cross-functional team. Some important and most common features of SEO campaigns are usually finding the right keywords, write or re-write SEO content to publish, back-link research plus measure the SEO KPI results as an ongoing process.

When measuring SEO success I pay attention to: - impressions (= to determine the overall website visibility on search result pages. If the web pages recognized as relevant to specific queries) - clicks (the higher a webpage on a search result page the more clicks it gets) - new users dynamics - organic traffic dynamics Tools: Google Analytics, Google Search Console