January 30, 2024
We know that search engine optimization is the most popular approach to increase your brand visibility on the web. Like every business, you must also be ticking your SEO goals and working on customized SEO strategies, but is that working?
How can you be sure that your SEO efforts are paying off? Yes, getting visitors to your website is a sign, but what is the resistance that may drive most of them away? According to Hubspot, 96% of website visitors need proper website experience to move ahead in the sales funnel. So, how can you determine your next move?
When you keep an eye on the right SEO metrics, you will know all the possible answers for your upcoming approach, as it’ll show all your strategies that are working and well….failing. The key is to watch the right numbers so you don’t waste time and money on things that don’t bring in the expected profit.
In this blog, we’ll discover the key factors impacting SEO metrics and different ways of tracking SEO success.
What is SEO KPI?
SEO KPIs are the scorecards that help you keep track of your SEO strategies. These tools showcase your website’s performance, revealing insights into factors such as visibility, search engine rankings, and customer conversion rates. They provide a comprehensive view of how effectively your online presence is resonating with your target audience.
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While many businesses use it for good analytics and boost sales, it is smart to look at your pain points also as your competitors can take advantage of your vulnerabilities. These can point out areas where you can make changes and find new opportunities for success.
Also Read: CUSTOMIZED LOCAL SEO SOLUTIONS FOR SUCCESS
10 SEO Metrics to Analyze Performance
Although all aspects of search engine algorithms aren’t easy to grasp, you can always try to work on the SEO metrics that impact your website performance. Following are some KPIs to look for to measure your website progress:
Sales & Leads Conversions
The most important thing to check in SEO metrics is how many people visiting your website through search engines actually end up doing something valuable for your business, like making a purchase, signing up, or subscribing.
To show that your SEO work is doing well, you should keep an eye on these organic conversions. It’s a direct way to prove that your SEO efforts are paying off, as these actions can be linked back to your SEO activities.
How to Measure?
Before you start any marketing campaign, make a note of how many conversions you get at that time. This will be your starting point. Later on, it’s not just about the total number of conversions, but also about the percentage of people from your organic search visitors who actually take action.
Many businesses also utilize tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, and others to track organic conversations. Google has even introduced the latest version GA4 which simplifies this tracking process; you can mark these conversions as events for easy tracking.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a way to measure the amount of money each customer brings to your business. It reveals the long-term value of every visitor turning into your customer. Knowing CLV helps you figure out where to put your money in SEO. Unlike some other SEO numbers, CLV is prominent because every department in your company has a crucial usage of it to make informed decisions. It even predicts how much profit you’ll make from one customer during the time they stick with your business.
You can even use CLV to sort your customers into different groups. This helps you decide where to put your focus and resources. For example, if people who buy less expensive things end up making you more money in the long run, you might want to guide more visitors to those products.
According to Jeff Coyle, co-founder of MarketMuse, CLV is extremely integral for businesses that nobody should neglect. By focusing on CLV, you can make every department in the company work together as it guarantees your business keeps growing every year.
How to Measure?
Customer lifetime value is basically the product of customer value and customer lifespan. To measure customer value, you need to take an average of the frequency of the customer’s purchase and average purchase cost. The average customer lifespan is the quotient of the number of active years for a customer and the number of total customers.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
As per marketing perspective, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) defines the cost of getting new customers following a specific way of promotion and advertisements. It’s like counting all the expenses from the first time someone hears about your product to when they become a customer. While it can be used broadly, people often use it when talking about how much money is spent on advertising.
CPA is different from other metrics like Cost Per Conversion or Cost Per Impression because it covers the entire journey from getting someone’s attention to them actually becoming a customer.
Another term you might hear is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), but CPA is more detailed because it looks at specific channels or campaigns instead of giving an average cost across all channels and efforts.
How to Measure?
To find out your CPA, you just need to divide the total cost by the number of new customers you got from that same way of advertising. One thing to note here is if you want to measure the CPA of a single promotional campaign then you add that specific advertisement cost, otherwise it is the total of all the advertising costs
Organic CTR
Click-through rate (CTR) doesn’t directly affect your ranking, but if your CTR is better then it means more people are clicking on your Google listing. The real value behind CTR is to let you know how well the meta title and description are matching with your visitor’s potential search phrase.
You can measure CTR for both individual pages and specific search terms, showing the percentage of people who click on your page after spotting it in the search results. It also reflects the traffic visiting your page, being a key prospect for tracking SEO success.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Want to know if you are making more money than your investment on your website? Return on investment is the SEO metrics that help you find out the percentage of profit you’re earning. Most businesses measure it to find out if your website is better at search engines and making more money with the SEO strategies you have put in or tracking SEO success. It helps connect what you do online with what your business wants to achieve.
A positive ROI is when you’re making more money than what you have invested in your SEO effort or website maintenance. Getting positive results from SEO isn’t a quick process and you need to try and test different strategies to get your desired results.
How to Measure?
The percentage of profit you earn from your SEO efforts and the total expense you have dealt with is the return on investment. You can assess for either a particular campaign or overall expense.
Backlinks
Inbound links or backlinks are the links incorporated on other sites leading visitors to your website. It reflects the website authority and credibility of your business which can increase search engine ranking.
If you want to drive organic traffic and appeal to the search engine then you have to strengthen on-page and off-page SEO for your website. Links within your site (internal links) help with navigation, while links to other sites (external links) serve various purposes like providing context, supporting claims, or citing sources.
Search engines value backlinks, considering them a sign of your content’s worth. Backlinks are crucial for a website’s success in gaining organic search traffic.
Organic Visibility
Organic visibility, also known as search visibility, measures how easily people can find your brand in online searches without paid advertising. It’s an important SEO metric, directly impacting your business growth and brand exposure.
Back in the day, visibility meant ranking on traditional SERPs, but now with the integrated AI, the search results are much more diverse, including knowledge panels, local packs, and featured snippets. Still, the output is still the same; if your organic visibility is high, your website will reach more potential customers.
How to Measure?
You can use Google Search Console to track your organic visibility as it shows the frequency of your site appearing on search results. You just have to check the search results report under the performance tab. After that, you can compare the results against your competitors.
Organic Sessions
An organic session happens when someone discovers your website by searching on Google or Bing, not through paid ads. In Google Analytics, a session is the time a user spends on your site, counting every click and interaction. It tracks page views and time spent on each page.
The number of sessions is integral to SEO metrics depending on new users and unique visits. The session duration shows if visitors stay or leave quickly, affecting bounce rates. These organic sessions come from people finding your site in search engine results. Organic traffic refers to visitors reaching your site through search results, excluding paid ads, social media, direct links, or other referrals.
How to Measure?
You can calculate the organic traffic by subtracting the traffic you have gotten through advertisements or social media from the total traffic on your website.
Keyword Rankings
Tracking keyword rankings is crucial in SEO because it gives you detailed insights into which words bring visitors to your site and why. Usually, when your keyword rankings go up, you get more traffic and, as a result, more business.
In the past, businesses focused on just a few keywords, thinking that’s all that mattered. But now, with semantic search, one page of content can rank for many different keywords. While it has also become necessary to know the keywords that are performing well, the low-performing keywords can also be useful for your SEO efforts. It helps to assess the keywords that are taking your content to the top of search engine results and on which pages you need to make changes.
Google Business Profile Metrics
For local businesses that need to increase popularity within a particular search location range, Google Business Profile can help in managing their presence on Google. It is a free tool by Google also known as Google My Business to improve brand recognition through parameters like reviews, ratings, and photos. Improving your Google Business Profile, website, or listing management can lead to more searches or calls.
Once you’ve set it up, you can see various important SEO metrics like searches, views, clicks, direction requests, and calls. It is a relatively new SEO metric but a necessity specifically for local businesses.
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Summing Up
Most people wonder where they are lacking in maintaining an online presence for their business. Building SEO metrics and tracking them religiously on a monthly or quarterly basis can impact significantly the website performance. Metrics including click-through rate, keyword rankings, and organic conversion can help you clearly analyze what’s working and what needs improvement.
Depending on your SEO team, you can either use tools like Google Analytics or manually assess the results. It offers valuable insights into user behavior proving the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. If you regularly monitor and adjust your SEO efforts based on key performance indicators, it’ll help your website attract more visitors.
Still unclear about the SEO metrics that matter for your business? Consider reaching out to Vitruvian Agency for SEO services as they assist recognized businesses in setting up and tracking these metrics to bring effective results.
Don’t forget, the basics of online presence aren’t restricted to having a website but you have to measure and optimize it to lock in the success.
