If you ask 10 SEO experts what their key SEO performance indicators (KPIs) are, you're likely to get 10 different answers. But, there are some essential KPIs that you should be tracking to measure the success of your SEO campaign. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that measures the profits each customer brings. Content efficiency is a fascinating metric because it's about optimizing content not only for search engines, but also for achieving the company's goals for that content.
Average content teams create content that reaches 10% of their goals, while good content teams operate 40% or more. Google Analytics 4 tracks user engagement with a website, something that can be difficult to measure accurately. The average interaction time tells us the average amount of time the site was focused on the user's browser. Most search ranking reports work with the old blue 10 link model, but search results have evolved and now we need to look at things like “Pixels from Above” to get more information about ranking.
Tracking the ROI of your SEO activities is crucial for the simple reason that it is the best measure of success that there is more money in the bank than you spend. But remember that it can take time to see an ROI, often six to 12 months or more. Know where your ROI goal is and you can measure your performance against this on a regular basis, understanding and reporting on how you are improving. You can measure ROI based on your investment in SEO and the revenue returned by the channel.
Organic visibility is another solid KPI that you can track and measure to show consistent growth. You can measure and report on this in two ways: either by looking at impressions or by looking at keyword trends in Semrush's Organic Research tool. An increase in impressions shows an increase in organic visibility and a large measure of continued growth. An increase in organic visibility should result in an increase in organic sessions, and this is where you really start to notice an improvement in your SEO ROI.
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who browse outside the site after viewing only one page. Having a high bounce rate can mean that your site's content needs a little improvement, that you're not getting close to your target audience or maybe your page speed is too slow. Page load time is another important KPI; the ideal loading time for a website would be about 2 to 5 seconds maximum, but the faster the better. More than 5 seconds and you'll see your bounce rate increase significantly.
SEO performance is the impact of efforts implemented to drive traffic to a website or website through targeting by keywords, internal links and backlinks, among many others. The ultimate goal of generating SEO traffic is to drive customers looking for specific keywords to the specific landing page optimized to convert to a sale. Organic traffic is one of the most important SEO KPIs to track as it's specific and targets high-intent customers; it's also the backbone of your customer's online presence, providing long-term value to your business. Google Business Profile Metrics show that organic search is 5 times more valuable than Google Ads.
