While traditional marketing appeals to mass audiences with limited targeting, digital marketing is the exact opposite. It allows you the ability to test, monitor, and optimize your campaigns to a targeted audience.
Having the ability to have more defined targets for marketing campaigns and monitor the performance has revolutionized the field of marketing and advertising. It has made it possible for companies to grow their customer base and sales online.
Here are our steps to measuring SEO KPI performance for your campaigns. You’ll learn the essential KPI’s for monitoring SEO performance and how you can measure the success or identify areas to adjust. There are a lot of great tools available online at no charge so it is easy to get your program setup at a low cost.
Let’s get started.
What is SEO Performance?
SEO performance is the measurement of how successful SEO strategy is working. It’s executed through the use of a variety of techniques and practices. And those techniques aim at helping businesses grow by attracting more organic traffic. The success of your SEO strategy or plan depends on the optimization of a large number of factors simultaneously.
For example, a 7% boost in organic traffic is a positive result that indicates the your strategy for search engine optimization is working in achieving higher rankings and more impressions.
However, a steadiness or decrease in keyword rankings, despite optimizing your website, implies that you may be doing something wrong.
Why Should You Monitor SEO Performance?
Monitoring your SEO performance gives you ability to learn more about your targeted audience. You’ll be able to learn more about their interests and behaviors. Knowing this information will allow you to adjust your content to be more relevant, create new content based on current topics that are trending, create better engagement and experience, and potentially decrease your digital spend.
What is an SEO KPI to Track for Optimization Success?
An SEO KPI is a measure that helps you evaluate the results of your SEO efforts.
You must set these KPIs and metrics in the beginning of your marketing and digital planning. Enacting during the beginning of an SEO campaign will allow for outlining your goals and objectives and to establish a baseline to what success will look like.
The 5 Most Important KPIs to Monitor Your SEO Performance
Every business has specific targets to measure their success. However there are 5 KPI’s that should be included in all SEO campaigns.
1 – Organic Traffic
This comes first in our list due to the huge effect it has on the rest of the metrics below.
Organic traffic is the number of website visitors that come directly from search engines.
Your website sessions and user visits provides an idea about your overall website’s performance. But, organic sessions and clicks are focused on your SEO performance.
Getting more organic traffic to your site means that your SEO strategy is working.
How to measure organic traffic
To track your organic traffic, you need to create and verify your Google Analytics account first.
You can check out our beginner’s guide for how you can to get started with Google Analytics.
Then go to Acquisition > Overview, and select Organic Search.
You’ll get a detailed graph that shows exactly how your organic traffic has changed in a chosen period.
You’ll get a detailed graph that shows exactly how your organic traffic has changed in a chosen period.
You can adjust the period, compare two channels, or see which keywords are bringing you the most organic traffic.
Checking out this graph on a regular basis is a must for any business that’s looking to grow.
It makes it easy for you to notice any anomalies or fluctuations in your results. And that helps you adjust your SEO strategy and update your plans accordingly.
2 – Keyword Rankings
Keyword ranking is the position of your web pages in the SERPs for one phrase or keyword.
The higher your keyword rankings, the better your chances are at attracting more visitors. That results in a boost in other metrics and your marketing results in general.
Keep in mind that keyword rankings can often be misleading. And sometimes, they aren’t necessarily in a direct relationship with growth.
For example, some keywords have low buyer intent. Thus, they’ll only bring you visitors who are still in the awareness stage who may not necessarily buy from you.
Other keywords may be too competitive to rank for. That makes growth impossible for you if you put all your focus on them.
3 – Organic CTR
Organic CTR (click-through-rate) is the percentage of users that click on a webpage in the search results.
For example, the CTR for a web page that gets 1000 impressions a month but only 20 clicks is 2%
CTR mainly determined by the positioning of your pages in the SERPs.
But that’s not the only factor.
You must also optimize your title, URL, and description to be more clickable and engaging. Once you make them attractive, more searchers will click and visit your pages. And you’ll watch your CTR go through the roof.
Google has confirmed before that CTR is a ranking signal. The algorithm takes into consideration CTR to determine which results are getting more clicks.
SERP placement is all about getting more clicks on your website. If your site is ranking fourth but gets more clicks, it gets more visitors.
Therefore, it’s doing better than the websites ranking higher.
How to measure organic click-through-rate
To measure organic CTR, you need to have a verified Google Search Console account.
If you already have an account, click on Performance from the sidebar menu on the left.
You’ll get a detailed graph with your total clicks and impressions, average CTR, and average position.
To get the average CTR for individual pages, click on a page from the list below the graph. The data will change and only show you information related to that single page.
If you don’t already have a Google Search Console account, you must create one and verify before you get access to this data.
Once done, you must wait for a few weeks before the data is generated and stored into your account.
4 – Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after only viewing one page. It differs depending on lots of factors including website, industry, traffic, season, etc.
Of course, not all pages on your website should be evaluated the same way.
For example, it’s reasonable for your contact page to have a 95% bounce rate. It contains all the information a potential client might need to contact you. So, they’ll leave it once they get what they want.
Thus, a high bounce rate shouldn’t necessarily be associated with low-quality content. Sometimes it just means that users are finding the information they’re looking for on a single page.
Yet, most of the time, a high bounce rate is a bad sign for your SEO strategy. It could mean that the content on the page isn’t meeting the expectations of your visitors. It isn’t providing the information they needed.
How to measure bounce rate
First, access your Google Analytics account — then go to Audience > Overview.
By default, you’ll get results for website visitors from the previous week. You can specify the duration you want by changing the date.
Once done, you’ll get your website bounce rate for that specific period.
To get the bounce bate for individual pages, click on Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
You’ll get a list of your website pages with their bounce rates.
5 – Conversions
A conversion is any desired action a user takes when browsing your website. It comes in many forms and types, and it often indicates the effectiveness of your web design and copy.
Conversions differ between websites depending on the marketing goals set by the company.
Examples of online conversions include:
- Email sign ups
- Completed sales
- Case study downloads
- Form completions
Conversion rate is the total number of visitors divided by the number of actions taken. This rate reflects the quality of visitors landing on your web pages and how they’re interacting with them.
The ultimate goal for most businesses is converting leads into customers.
If you drive people to your website but never convert them, your efforts will always be fruitless. That’s why it’s crucial for you to monitor your website conversions and improve them.
How to measure conversion rates
To track your website conversions, you must first set up conversion goals using Google Analytics.
Go to Conversions > Goals > Overview, then click Set up goals.
1 – Choose Goal Setup:
2 – Goal description: enter a name for your goal to help you remember it in the future. Select the type, and click Continue.
3 – Enter goal details: fill in the details depending on the type you chose in the previous step. After that, hit Save.
Once you finish setting up your goal, Google Analytics will start recording data.
Give it some time to record conversions.
Conclusion
If you’re not tracking your SEO success, it’s time to get started.
Keeping track of your performance is a crucial element in any digital marketing strategy. That helps you improve your products and services by understanding how your audience interacts with them.
Want highly-targeted attract traffic for your website? Start by generating a detailed SEO report for your business website using our SEO Analyzer Tool.
If you need help with anything, don’t hesitate to contact us today.
