One way that digital marketers can measure the success of their work is by examining key SEO metrics.
These metrics allow you to see the overall impact of your efforts, identify any issues before they become problems, and demonstrate your impact to others.
1. ROI
The goal of an SEO strategy for most businesses is to increase their return on investment. This can be done by investing in an in-house team or working with an agency.
It is important to track the ROI of your SEO activities because it is the best way to measure success. Keep in mind that it can take a while to see an ROI, usually six to twelve months or more.
If you know what your target ROI is, you can measure your performance against it on a regular basis. This will give you a better understanding of how your performance is improving.
2. Conversions (Sales and Leads)
An effective way to measure the success of your organic marketing campaign is to track the number of sales or leads it generates. This is because an increase in organic conversions is likely due to your campaign efforts.
Be sure to know the conversion benchmark before you begin working on a campaign. Otherwise, you will find it harder to showcase the increase from what was already being generated
It is recommended to take the average conversions generated in the three months before your campaign began and use this as a benchmark to measure growth.
By landing page
If you want to know how effective your marketing message is, you should measure your conversion rate by landing page. This is because conversions are usually determined by how effective the page is. If you find that one page has a higher conversion rate than another, that means that the page is more effective.
By location
If you want to figure out which areas your marketing message is resonating with the most, you can do so by tracking organic conversions by geographic location. Once you’ve pinpointed which areas those are, you can then invest more marketing dollars into those regions.
By device
It is very difficult to gain a large market share unless you make an effort to appeal to those using mobile devices. To see how successful your site is in appealing to people on mobile devices, you need to look at the conversion rate by device for organic traffic.
If you find your website is not being accessed as much by mobile users as it is by desktop users, then your site is not set up for a mobile audience. You should test your site and see if there are ways to improve the mobile experience.
By browser
If you find that conversion rates differ depending on the browser being used, it’s likely that your site is not optimized for users of certain browsers. Get in touch with your development team and ask them to make sure the site works well on all popular browsers.
3. Organic Visibility
If you’re looking to show consistent growth in your SEO efforts, one key performance indicator (KPI) to track is organic visibility. There are two ways to measure and report on this.
This is the perfect way to show continued growth in visibility. 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 traffic driving positions (yet).
The Semrush ‘Organic Research’ tool lets you see how your visibility has changed for all indexed keywords, not just the ones in higher positions. This is done by looking at keyword trends.
4. Organic Sessions
An increase in organic impressions will likely lead to an increase in organic sessions. You can use this data to measure the success of your SEO strategy.
If your efforts are successful, you will see an increase in organic traffic.
The goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic, which will in turn lead to more conversions. An increase in organic traffic is the point at which you will start to see an improvement in your SEO ROI.
5. Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic
Brand recognition usually drives traffic to a business, either because the customer has seen the brand before or because someone else has recommended it. For example, a customer may have seen an advertisement or public relations campaign, or even met someone from the company in person. It’s important to remember that in these cases, the customer was already familiar with the brand.
Traffic that does not come from a specific brand name is usually from people who are searching for keywords related to your products or services. In other words, people who saw your business ranked on the search engine results page (SERP) and were not familiar with your business before that.
6. Keyword Rankings
Although keyword rankings may not be as significant as other metrics, they can still be useful and it is recommended that you track how your main target keywords are ranked on search engine results pages.
Keyword Tracking
Tracking keyword rankings is still useful, even though it’s not as important as it used to be. This is because it shows progress. For example, if your primary keywords are increasing in rank, it means that your strategy is working.
The Position Tracking tool can help you to monitor your progress for key phrases you are targeting on search engine results pages.
7. Backlinks
Maintaining a healthy link profile is essential if you want to rank highly on Google. This means keeping an eye on any new links you earn, as well as any 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
8. Organic CTR
Although CTR (click-through rate) is not a confirmed direct ranking factor, it is still important because it provides an indication of how often people are clicking on your links after seeing them in the search results. A high CTR indicates that your listing is being seen by many people and that it is relevant to what they are looking for.
By landing page
If you want to examine your CTR from an SEO perspective, look at your landing page. That will show you which pages are getting the most attention from the search results.
By top keywords
The CTR (click-through rate) of your top search terms in Google Search Console is another stat you should check. If you see that a term is getting you a lot of clicks, you should determine which pages are ranking for those keywords and ensure that your page content accurately reflects searcher intent. It might be a good idea to test conversion optimization elements on these pages, too.
9. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who land on your page and then leave immediately. A high bounce rate can indicate that your content is not engaging or relevant to the people who are finding it through search engines.
A high bounce rate means that users are not staying on the page, which means that there are missed opportunities to convert them into customers.
By landing page
It is also beneficial to look at the bounce rate in relation to specific landing pages. That way, you can identify which landing pages are more likely to cause visitors to leave, and which ones keep them engaged.
If a landing page has a high bounce rate, that could match the keyword the visitor plugged into the search engine.
10. Average Time on Page
If a user spends a longer amount of time on a specific page, they are typically more engaged with the content on that page. The engagement level of the user is usually proportional to the likelihood of them completing a desired action, such as making a purchase.
You need to measure the average time spent on your website and on individual pages. If the duration is low, try to find ways to increase it.
11. Coverage Issues
Google search console allows you to analyze any coverage issues your site suffers 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
12. PageSpeed
The speed of your site can negatively impact both your search rankings and conversions. Pay close attention to site speed to improve traffic and conversions.
These metrics can change over time for a variety of reasons.
The images on your blog post may have been replaced with new, larger files that are slowing down the page.
Your server’s performance may have decreased since you last checked your site’s speed.
13. Organic traffic
Traffic that you earn from appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) without paying for placement is referred to as organic traffic.
The goal of SEO is to improve the ranking of a website for keywords that are relevant to the site’s niche.
You should track your overall organic traffic to gauge the success of your SEO strategy in attracting visitors to your site.
By landing page
In general, the organic traffic a website gets is not specific to any one page on the site. You need to track organic traffic to individual pages, so that you can see which pages need improvement.
By location
You should keep tabs on the sources of your website’s organic traffic, especially if your SEO goals involve reaching particular locations or growing your business into new markets.
14. Top exit pages for organic traffic
The pages people visit right before they leave your website are called exit pages, and it’s important to keep track of which ones are the most popular. Why? Because those pages are likely the ones causing the most problems.
If you want people to stay interested in your website, you need to make sure that your pages are interesting. Take a look at your site and see what you can do to make it more appealing to visitors.
15. Breakdown of organic traffic from Bing and Google
Google is not the only search engine that your customers use. Many of them use Bing as well.
You should check how much of your traffic is coming from Google vs. Bing.
If you’re not getting as much traffic as you expected from one or more search engines, it’s probably a good idea to update your SEO strategy.
16. Keywords ranked in Google
A tool like SEMrush can tell you how many keywords your site is ranking for in Google. This data can then be used to help inform your SEO strategy.
Make a list of the keywords you want to rank for that you are not currently ranking for. These are the keywords you should focus on in your SEO campaigns.
If you are already ranking in the top 10 for some high-converting keywords, it is a good idea to continue using those keywords in your content marketing campaigns to ensure that you stay there.
17. Local visibility
If you have a physical storefront that customers can visit, it is important to keep track of your local visibility.
In other words, are you appearing in the top three spots on the local search engine results page when people search keywords related to your niche? Are you appearing when they type in the name of your city plus the name of your industry? If not, it’s time to focus on some local SEO.
18. Pages indexed in Google Search Console
No one will find your website if it isn’t indexed. Make sure to pay attention to how many pages on your website are indexed.
If you notice that it is taking an unusually long time for your pages to get indexed, you can always submit them manually using the Crawl>Fetch as Google option in Google Search Console.
19. Pages crawled per day
The Google Search Console can tell you how many pages have been crawled within the last 90 days.
If you have a large website with thousands of pages, but only a small percentage of those pages are being crawled by Google, it could be an indication that there is a problem with your website’s crawl budget. Google will not crawl your entire website if it appears that doing so would use up too many of the system resources on your website.
20. Duplicate titles and descriptions
Google Search Console can be used to check how many duplicate titles and descriptions are on your website. Having duplicate content is usually not advised, as it can tell search engines that all the pages are about the same thing. This can then weaken your topical authority and make it harder to rank well for those terms.
If you realize that you have the same content on many pages of your website, it would be beneficial to either make it more original or to block it.
21. Crawl errors
The Google Search Console also provides information about crawl errors. You can view errors for the entire website or for specific segments. Any errors that you find should be fixed as soon as possible.
Tracking specific KPIs related to your SEO campaign can help to keep your efforts focused, and also allows you to measure the performance of your campaign over time.