KPI’S to track SEO performance in 2022

Google ranks webpages based on:

• How well your page content aligns with your target keywords typed into Google
• Backlinks which determine your authority and credibility and impact how your website performs in competitive searches
• Optimisation of meta titles and headlines.
• User experience satisfaction from as how many clicks a webpage generates, browser tracking and bounce rate.

Here’s how your company can further incorporate these tactics to track SEO performance

Search impressions and clicks:

The easiest way to track search impressions and clicks is using a tool that can track this for you. There are many search engine platforms that track performance data such as Google Search Console. This is important as Google Analytics tracks what happens after the users enter your website. This helps to learn how often your site is displayed along with total clicks.

Learning your total impressions and clicks each month creates an opportunity to improve these numbers over time.

Keyword rankings and search positions:

The higher your search rankings on the search engine result pages, the more traffic you will receive. This is because the first result generally has the largest click through rate, with each listing appearing afterwards gaining a smaller portion of the remaining clicks “On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67% of all the clicks”

Using keyword data, you should have a list of target keywords to try and make your website visible to. Use rank tracking tools such as SEMrush to keep track of these target keywords and monitor if the changes you are making to your website are positively impacting your rankings.

You can monitor ranking performance for your KPI’s by number of first page impressions, average position of target keywords or landing page links. It is important to keep track of your page ranking improvements over time.

Amount of website visitors and user experience:

One of the most important KPI’s is the total of unique organic visitors. Any successful SEO campaign should drive traffic to your website through organic searches and clicks from search engines. This can be presented from Google Analytics to track the quantitative data of visitors along with behaviour through qualitative data.

Key metrics to pay close attention for include bounce rate, pages per session and average session durations. The goal is for visitors to stay on the page links longer but also have a great experience. This can be measured through bounce rate and average session durations.

As page traffic increases your conversions should generally increase at the same rate. Monitoring the behavioural metrics helps to establish a baseline and indicate what needs changing to your website’s structure, content or ranking of keywords. These behavioural metrics help specify if the changes that are made are positive or negative.

Web Page Speed:

Your webpage speed is important as most users have very little patience. Fast websites that are well structured and easily accessible have a significant advantage in the search engine result pages.

You can measure and monitor your web page's mobile speed and page quality using Google page speed. These tools generally report a site load time, along with Google Core Web Vital metrics such as loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of web pages.

Once you have increased into a fast load speed, it is critical to keep track of these metrics ongoing as websites can slow down over time.

Utilising Backlinks:

Building up your backlink profile is an uncommon yet vital aspect of an SEO strategy for ranking your website organically. In fact, “91% of all pages never get any organic traffic from Google, mostly due to the fact they don't have backlinks”.

Backlinks show search engines that your website and content is reliable. Google’s algorithm looks at the volume and quality of the referring domains that link to your website. However, the number of websites that link to you is not as important as the quality of those backlinks and where they come from. The aim is for backlinks to be from industry authorities.

You should be increasing the total number of backlinks to your domain over time. Using SEO tools such as Ahrefs to monitor and measure your backlinks as well as the backlink profiles of competitors. These tools can calculate the link authority of specific links as well as quality. A good backlink profile is scored based on the number and quality of your referring domain and how it compares to all other domains on the internet.

Seo improvement:

Calculating your return on investment of your SEO’s allow you to demonstrate value and benchmark progress over time. Most organizations just use KPI metrics such as traffic and ranking positions when measuring SEO performance. Consider all internal and external investments when measuring just like any other marketing strategy. For example, are you outsourcing any SEO activities or using a third-party service?

Direct Revenue is great for ecommerce websites where people place direct purchases. Consider the real dollars, time and staffing expenses, and projected returns when measuring and tracking direct revenue and calculating the return on investment.

Lifetime Customer Value is to estimate the long-term value of each opportunity and is generally used for service-based businesses. It is easier and less costly to retain previous customers than to win new ones over. Repeat customers also contribute to your non-monetary goals in various ways such as organic traffic over the duration of their relationship with your organization. So, it’s vital to incorporate lifetime customer value into your return on investment for SEO’s.

Consider these digital marketing tactics when determining which KPI’s you want to track, consider your businesses vision and goals for search engine optimisation. Think about the business impacts, anticipated returns and intended revenue to put your company ahead in 2022.

Need help establishing your KPIs, rolling out SEO initiatives, or benchmarking your success? Talk to one of us here at Marketing Eye.

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