10 KPIs that must be monitored in an SEO campaign

Objectives and KPIs are among the most important components of the SEO strategy, but they are also one of the most frequently overlooked aspects.

Without KPI, you won’t be able to effectively track the progress of the campaign, you won’t know if your efforts are paying off or if you’re on the right path to success.

It’s no secret that SEO takes time to deliver results and profitability, but by establishing KPIs (key performance indicators) you’ll be in a better position to demonstrate the impact your strategy is having on the business.

In our guide, we will help you understand the most important KPIs that you should use for an SEO campaign.

Table of Contents

Ten SEO KPIs that we must monitor

Listing all of the KPIs you should monitor on a regular basis to obtain a clear picture of how your SEO strategy is developing may be complicated, so we’ve concentrated on the 10 most significant KPIs in my view.

These are metrics that give you an overview of how your efforts are paying off, while identifying any problems before they turn into real headaches.

SWARM

For almost any business, the ultimate goal of an SEO strategy is to generate a return on investment. And whether it is an investment in an internal team, with related resources, or in an agency, it still means earning more money than was spent.

But remember that it can take some time to see a return on investment, often between 6 and 12 months or more.

You can measure ROI by calculating a ratio between the amount spent on the SEO campaign and the sales or leads it generated.

Conversions (Sales and potential customers)

While an economic return is the main KPI that many companies focus on, it inevitably takes time to see the profitability of an SEO strategy. For this reason, you should not rely only on ROI.

Measuring and tracking organic conversions (sales, leads or both, depending on the objectives) is an effective way to demonstrate success.

One tip is to take an average of the conversions generated in the three months prior to the start of the campaign and use it as a benchmark to measure growth.

You can track conversions easily in Google Analytics.

Organic visibility

Going back to the point about taking time to see results, a solid KPI that you can track and measure to show consistent growth is organic visibility. You can measure it in two ways.

First of all, by interpreting the data from Google Search Console.

This is the perfect way to show a continuous increase in visibility, because the number of impressions shows how many times your site was visible in search for certain keywords, even if they did not generate clicks. In general, this is due to the fact that there is an increase in the ranking of the keywords placed, but they are not (yet) in the positions that allow the generation of traffic.

Organic sessions

The increase in organic impressions should lead to an increase in the sessions that come from organic and from here you can start to demonstrate the real impact of your SEO strategy.

Impressions generate traffic, and traffic turns into conversions; from this perspective, increasing organic sessions is where you really start to see an improvement in ROI.

Measuring organic sessions is very simple in Google Analytics. However, to track your SEO KPIs, we recommend that you focus on Google Search Console data, as this will allow you to exclude brand searches and only see organic clicks for keywords of interest.

One important thing to keep in mind when looking at organic sessions is seasonality – make sure you compare year over year rather than month over month to compare similar periods and to account for any seasonal fluctuations in demand .

Keyword positioning

Although tracking your keyword ranking may seem less important than some of the other metrics mentioned so far, it can be useful and we strongly recommend that you monitor the ranking of your main keywords in the SERPs.

If we look back even five years ago, the ranking was the main measure for the success of an SEO campaign.

So what changed? Semantic search.

In the past, most companies followed a few keywords and based their strategy success on it; Today, the content of a single page can rank for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of different keywords.

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the top three Google ranking factors and there is no indication that this will change anytime soon. You need to know the current state of the backlinks profile, both in terms of being able to evaluate any new links received, as well as for any problems related to them.

The values you should consider are:

Total number of backlinks
The total number of reference domains
The number of lost links
The number of links obtained
Toxic bonds

These numbers must be read in a certain context, because you do not see them in a real context. You should also compare your link profile with your closest competitors.

organic CTR

The CTR is a simple value that shows the percentage of people who click on your page after their search triggered a display – the higher, the better.

Organic CTR becomes really important to help you determine how relevant your title tag and meta description (the elements that appear in SERPs) are to a particular search.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is an important metric to determine if users interact with the created content, and thus if the article or page they found is relevant to their search.

A high bounce rate usually means that the page is not attracting users’ attention, which means a missed opportunity to turn this traffic into conversions. And sometimes small adjustments are enough to see an improvement, but if you don’t track this regularly, you may not find the opportunity.

Average time on page

The more time a user spends on a page, the more engaged they will be. And the more involved a user is, the greater the chance to convert.

That’s why you need to measure the average time, both at the site level and at the page level, and consider ways to increase it if you see that this value is low.

Page speed

The speed of your site can have a negative impact both on the ranking (and on the resulting traffic) and on the conversions, so it is worth paying special attention.

I know what you’re thinking: you’ve already taken the time to optimize your sites’ PageSpeed score and things are going really well. And that’s great. But when did you take care of it?

These values can change over time for several reasons.

What would happen if someone in your team replaced the images of your blog posts with new ones, forgetting to optimize them? There may now be large files slowing down these pages.

Maybe your server is not working as well as when you last analyzed the speed of the site.

The thing is, these things can change over time, so it pays to keep an eye on your site’s speed.

Setting and measuring SEO KPIs will help you stay focused, improving the effectiveness of your efforts and allowing you to continuously monitor the performance of your SEO campaign.

Although every marketer has their own KPIs to monitor and report to the main stakeholders, what matters is to configure and analyze them periodically.

KPIs can help you maintain and track growth, acting as indicators of your progress against broader goals.