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Shelley Walsh October 9, 2020

12 Important SEO KPIs You Should Track

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The Importance of Properly Tracking KPIs

Goals and KPIs are among the most important parts of your SEO strategy, yet one of the most
commonly overlooked areas.

Without KPIs, you will not be able to e ectively track your campaign's progress and ensure that your
e orts are paying o or determine if you are on the right track towards success.
It is no hidden secret that SEO takes time to deliver results and returns, but by setting KPIs (key
performance indicators), you can be in a better position to demonstrate the impact that your strategy is
having on business.

They can also help you to manage expectations with other stakeholders. SEO KPIs should form the basis
of your strategy and act as a way to both measure and report on success and progression, but you need
to know what you should be measuring. 

In the guide below, I will help you understand the most important KPIs you should be using.

Speci cally, we will cover:

12 SEO KPIs You Need To Track

1. ROI

2. Conversions (Sales and Leads)

3. Organic Visibility

4. Organic Sessions

5. Branded vs. Non-Branded Tra c

6. Keyword Rankings

7. Backlinks

8. Organic CTR

9. Bounce Rate

10. Average Time on Page

11. Coverage Issues

12. PageSpeed

12 SEO KPIs You Need To Track

It can be confusing to know which KPIs you should be tracking to see a regular snapshot of how your
SEO campaign is progressing, so we have rounded up 12 that we think are essential to keep a close eye
on.

These are metrics that give you an overall view of how your e orts are paying o , allowing you to
demonstrate the impact you are having while also spotting any issues before they turn into problems. 
1. ROI

For almost every business, an SEO strategy's ultimate goal is to drive a return on investment. And
whether that is an investment into an in-house team and resources or an agency, that means seeing
more money back than you spend.

Tracking ROI from your SEO activities is crucial for the simple reason that it is the best measure of
 Share  91
success that there is — more money in the bank than you are spending. But remember that it can take
time to see an ROI, often six to 12 months or more. 

Know where your ROI target is, and you can measure your performance against this on a regular basis,
understanding and reporting on how it is improving.

You can measure ROI based upon your investment into SEO, and the revenue returned from the
channel. 

2. Conversions (Sales and Leads)

While a nancial return is the overarching KPI that many businesses work to, it inevitably takes time to
see returns. And for that reason, you shouldn’t rely on ROI alone. 

Measuring and tracking organic conversions (either sales, leads, or both depending on your business's
set up) is a solid way to demonstrate success. After all, an increase in organic conversions can easily be
attributed to your e orts. 

Just be sure to know the conversion benchmark before you began working on a campaign; otherwise,
you will nd it harder to showcase the increase from what was already being generated.

A recommendation is to take an average of conversions generated in the three months before your
campaign began and use this as a benchmark for measuring growth. 

You can track conversions in Google Analytics, measuring goals for lead conversions and the eCommerce
report to track sales by channel. 
3. Organic Visibility

Coming back to the point that it takes time to see nancial returns from SEO, one solid KPI that you can
track and measure to show consistent growth is organic visibility. And you can measure and report on
this in two ways.

First, showcasing growth in impressions from Google Search Console.

This is the perfect way to show continued growth in visibility, given that impressions show the searches
that your site was visible for, even if they didn’t result in clicks. Typically, that is because you see an
increase in ranked keywords, but these aren’t in tra c driving positions (yet).

Either way, an increase in impressions shows an increase in organic visibility and a great measure of
continued growth. 
You can also show an increase in organic visibility by looking at keyword trends on the Organic Research
tool in SEMrush, where you can see how your visibility has changed for all indexed keywords, including
those in lower positions. 

4. Organic Sessions

Growth in organic impressions should result in an increase in organic sessions, and this is where you can
start to demonstrate a real impact from your SEO strategy.

Once your e orts are taking e ect, one of the key metrics that you will see an impact on is organic
sessions (tra c).

Impressions result in tra c, and tra c turns into conversions; and when you look at it this way, seeing
an increase in organic sessions is the point at which you truly start to notice an improvement in your SEO
ROI.

Measuring organic sessions is really simple to measure in Google Analytics. But, for the purpose of
tracking SEO KPIs, we recommend focusing on data from Google Search Console, as this will allow you
to exclude brand searches and view organic clicks for non-branded terms in isolation.

This is important to ensure your data isn’t being skewed by brand activities that are driving an increase
in branded searches.

To do this, head to the Performance report and hit the +New button at the top of your screen where
you can choose to lter out your brand by choosing 'Queries not containing.' Enter your brand name
(and variations of), and you will see how non-branded tra c is performing.
A key thing to pay attention to when analyzing organic sessions is seasonality, making sure you are
comparing Year on Year rather than Month on Month to compare like for like and accounting for any
seasonal uctuation in demand. 

To do this, hit the date bubble at the top of your screen, choose 'compare', and select your preferential
period.
5. Branded vs. Non-Branded Tra c

While you want to exclude branded searches to analyze the true impact of your e orts on organic
tra c, another key measure of success and progression is a shift in the percentage split of non-branded
tra c that your site is receiving.

Branded tra c is usually driven either by previous knowledge of a business or a recommendation from
someone else. Maybe a searcher has seen your ads on social, seen your latest PR campaign, or even met
you at an event. What’s important to note here is that the searcher already knew about you.
While that clearly means one marketing channel is working well, this usually isn’t going to be tra c that
you can attribute directly to your SEO activities.

Non-branded tra c is usually people searching for keywords around your products or services that
you rank prominently for. In other words, tra c from searchers who probably weren’t familiar with your
business before they saw you ranked on the SERPs.

And you should be measuring the split of branded vs. non-branded tra c, something that you can easily
see using the SEMrush organic research tool:

6. Keyword Rankings

While keyword rankings maybe aren’t as important as some of the other metrics mentioned here, they
certainly have their use, and we strongly recommend that you track how your main target keywords are
ranking on the SERPs.

If we look back even ve years, rankings were how pretty much any SEO campaign's success was
measured.

So then, what changed? Semantic search. 

In the past, most businesses tracked a handful of keywords and hinged their strategy's success on that;
the reality is that nowadays, a single page of content can rank for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of
di erent keywords. And that is not forgetting personalized search — meaning that di erent searchers
can see di erent results for some queries.

Let's look at an example of di erent keywords. The Organic Research tool will let you see keywords a
page ranks for. For example, this article ranks for 132 keywords. Just look at the variations: 
Keyword Tracking

Tracking keyword rankings isn’t quite the measure that it once was, but it is still hugely useful to show
progression. After all, seeing your primary keywords increasing in rank ultimately means that your
strategy is starting to pay o .

You can use the SEMrush Position Tracking Tool to keep track of how your main keywords are ranking on
the SERPs.
7. Backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, and there is no sign of that changing any time
soon. You need to know the current health of your link pro le, both in terms of gaining sight of any new
links you are earning, as well as any issues with toxic links that appear.

The link metrics that you should be measuring are:

Total number of backlinks

Total number of referring domains 

Number links lost

Number of links earned

Toxic links

And you can track all of these with the SEMrush backlink analytics and backlink audit tools.
But in isolation, these don’t mean as much as they could, as you are not viewing the numbers in context.
You also need to be comparing your own link pro le to your closest competitors, and again, you can do
this by running their domains through the tool.

8. Organic CTR

CTR (click-through-rate) is used as a ranking factor, but the reality is that the better your organic CTR,
the more people are clicking on your listing on the SERPs.

You should be tracking this, both at a page-level and a query-level. 

CTR is a simple metric that shows the percentage of people who click on your page after their search
triggers an impression — the higher, the better.
Where organic CTR becomes really important is in helping you to determine how relevant your title tag
and meta description (the elements that show on the SERPs) are in relation to a given query.

Again, this needs context, and the average CTR each position can expect to receive is:

Source: Backlinko

Compare your own CTR to this, and you will quickly see whether you are outperforming the average or
have work to do. 

You can analyze the CTR of your own pages and queries in Google Search Console under the
performance report.
9. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is an important measure of whether your content is engaging those who land on the page
and can also be a great way to understand how relevant it is to the search queries that it is ranking for.

A high bounce rate typically means that the page isn’t capturing the attention of users, meaning missed
opportunities to turn this tra c into conversions. And sometimes, it only takes small changes to see a
noticeable improvement, but if you are not regularly tracking it, you might not spot the opportunity. 

You can see the bounce rate of your site and pages in Google Analytics under Behavior > Site Content
> All Pages.
10. Average Time on Page

The longer a user spends on a page, the more engaged they are. And the more engaged someone is, the
higher the chance that they will convert.

So, you need to be measuring the average time on page for your site, both on a sitewide and a page-
level basis, and consider ways to increase this if you see low durations.

You can track this in Google Analytics under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

11. Coverage Issues

Once referred to as 'crawl errors,' Google Search Console allows you to analyze any coverage issues your
site su ers from.

And typically, these include:

5xx server errors

4xx errors 

Crawl anomalies

Noindex pages

Crawled - currently not indexed

Discovered - currently not indexed

Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical

 Blocked by robots.txt

+ More

And in terms of tracking these issues as a KPI, regularly keeping an eye on these issues can help you to
stay on top of things that could hint at wider crawling or indexation problems. 

They might not be a true measure of success, but keeping errors to a minimum should be one of your
key objectives to ensure that all of your pages that should be indexed are. 

Find these under Index > Coverage in Google Search Console. 

12. PageSpeed

The speed of your site is something that can negatively impact both your search rankings (and resultant
tra c) and your conversions, and it pays to keep close attention to this.

Now, we know what you are thinking, that you have already spent time optimizing your sites PageSpeed
score, and things are looking really good. And that is great. But when was it?

These metrics can change over time for a number of reasons.

Maybe someone on your editorial team went and replaced your blog posts images with new ones but
forgot to optimize them, and now they have large le sizes that are slowing down these pages? 
Perhaps your server isn’t performing as well as it was when you last analyzed your site's speed.

The fact is that these things can change over time, so it pays
to keep a close eye on your site’s speed.

You can easily keep on top of this using the SEMrush Site Audit tool, running regular crawls (we suggest
weekly) that will highlight any pages deemed to be slow.

Speci cally, you can dig deep into the site performance report to see insights on speed. 

You can then act on these as they become an issue; rather than su ering as a result of poor page speed.
Setting and measuring SEO KPIs can help you to keep your e orts focused and continually measure the
performance of your campaign.

While every marketer has their own KPIs that they need to track and report on to key stakeholders, the
fact is that you need to have these in place and regularly be analyzing your site's performance against
them.

KPIs can help to keep your growth on track whilst acting as an indicator that you see progression against
your wider goals.

SEO

Shelley Walsh
Shelley is a content strategist and blog editor at SEMrush. Assistant Editor at Search Engine Journal. Founder of
ShellShock Content Marketing. Shelley has been a contributor to the industry for 10 years and has spoken at
many online and o ine events.

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