SEO is not an exact science. A lot of what we do in SEO is based on assumptions and has some probability of working, but it is often difficult to know whether it is actually working.

That is why it is important to arm yourself with some reliable metrics, so that you can both measure your results and identify new optimization opportunities.

In this article, I will look at the most important SEO KPIs (key performance indicators), as well as how tools find these metrics. Measuring the impact of SEO will help you know if you have chosen the right SEO strategy and give you the motivation to continue optimizing your website.

Tracking SEO KPIs is not just about SEO performance

The key to the success of any SEO campaign is how you set the right SEO goals (SEO KPIs) and how you measure their impact. That’s where marketers come in because, after all, the main goal of any business is to increase profits.

You’re always measuring SEO metrics and evaluating SEO efforts together with your Digital Marketing team. And, in terms of tracking SEO KPIs, successful website optimization means reaching a better targeted audience, at a lower cost.

1. Organic traffic

The ultimate goal of SEO is to get more users from search engines, so the main KPI you want to track is SEO Traffic. One thing to note is that organic traffic growth is often very gradual, to the point where it is almost unnoticeable.

It is helpful to evaluate organic traffic against previous periods, usually with a year-over-year chart, to make the value of your SEO efforts more visible.

How to check

Log into your Google Analytics dashboard and go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

Set a target date range of at least a month, but ideally a year.
Check Compare to previous period / previous year to create a benchmark.

Tip

Remember that as your site grows larger, you’re less likely to see meaningful fluctuations when looking at organic traffic for the entire site. That’s when you’ll need to focus on smaller segments of your site (blog, categories, products, etc.) or even individual pages.

Looking at their SEO Traffic alone will tell you a much better story about what’s going on with your search performance. This can be achieved by creating custom segments or using the filter options in Google Analytics.

Branded Traffic

While focusing on individual queries, analyze your branded traffic. Branded SEO traffic is brought to you by ranking for keywords that contain your company name.

These searchers are your direct customers, so branded traffic typically shows the highest conversion rates.

In addition to branded traffic, go into your organic search segment and look at commercial traffic, which is traffic driven by keywords with a clear purchase intent. Such queries include commercial words like “buy,” "order," and “sell.”

Focusing on the commercial component of your organic search provides insight into how well your company is positioned in the commercial segment.

Besides, commercial and branded traffic are just the right KPIs for marketers to track because they allow you to gauge your overall brand awareness.

According to John Mueller talking about the upcoming updates in 2021, if people are actively searching for your brand, it’s a sign that you’re doing something right.

You can see all your branded queries, their impressions, and their clicks in Google Search Console.

And if you connect your Search Console to Google Analytics (not GA4 at the moment, though), you’ll have all these stats at your fingertips. So, to check your branded traffic in Google Analytics:

Go to Conversions > Search Console > Queries.

Use advanced filters and create dimensions to filter only queries that include your company name.

Click Apply.

2. Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings are the positions your pages occupy in search results for certain queries. The higher the positions, the more noticeable your pages are in search, the more visitors they get.

On top of that, SEO traffic is very sensitive to the smallest changes in keyword rankings. Moving just one position in either direction can mean thousands of users gaining or losing traffic.

Monitoring keyword rankings and reacting quickly to fluctuations is the key to your SEO success.

Tip

It’s important to differentiate between what Google calls a jump and a true drop in rankings. If you see a small change in rankings, wait a week or so to see if it’s a glitch.

If the situation doesn’t resolve itself, it’s time to look at the pages that have outranked you and borrow their optimization ideas.

Online Visibility

A quick indicator to track for SEO KPIs is online visibility, which shows how prominent your website is for your choice of key terms.

Rank Tracker measures the overall visibility score as well as the visibility of individual keywords. A drop in visibility score is a signal that you need to pay more attention to your keyword rankings.

3. CTR Score

Impressions and clicks are search performance metrics; they represent how many times your pages appear in search results and how many times they are actually clicked.

Together, these two metrics give you your click-through rate (CTR), which is essentially how successful your pages are in search.

What you can do is benchmark your CTR against industry standards and find out which of your pages are underperforming relative to their SERP positions.

How to Check

Log into your Google Search Console dashboard and go to Search Results > Performance. Enable CTR and average position, and disable the other two.

In the table below, use the filter to see only the queries for which you rank in positions one through ten. Sort the list by position.

Scroll through the list and see if any of your pages have click-through rates below what is considered normal for their search position.

It’s interesting to note that the difference in CTR across some of the top positions on the SERP can be dramatic. Here’s a study that explores the distribution of CTR across the top 10 organic results.

However, keep in mind that this CTR distribution is relative; in addition to position, one should consider the layout of the SERP. Depending on what you see at the top (featured snippets, sitelinks, or any other rich feature), you may see different click-through rates across all positions on the results page.

Tip

When you find a promising topic, visit the SERP for that topic and investigate the reasons for the poor click-through rate. Sometimes the low CTR is due to too many ads and/or knowledge panels stealing your clicks, in which case there is nothing you can do.

Other times, the low CTR is due to your snippet not being compelling enough, in which case you should optimize your title and description and consider using structured data to enhance your snippet.

4. User Behavior

Bounce rate, session depth, and session duration are all behavioral SEO metrics, which are metrics of user engagement. Whether behavioral metrics are ranking factors or not is one of the longest-running debates in SEO, but I would argue that it doesn’t matter.

Behavioral metrics are still important indicators of on-page optimization, and as an SEO, you would do well to stack them in your favor.

All important SEO KPIs should be considered on a case-by-case basis. For example, bounce rate measures the number of people who visited your page and did not interact with your site again. A session is considered bounced when a user only views one page with a single request to the server (i.e., when a user loads a page, perhaps reads it, and then leaves).

In this case, a pageview occurred, although it was a number of non-visits. If the page was intended for a single action, then even a 90% bounce rate would be quite okay. Therefore, the purpose of any given page and its acceptable bounce rate will vary greatly.

How to Check

Log into your Google Analytics dashboard and go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search. You’ll see all three metrics side by side, sharing the Behavior tab.

Select landing page as your primary dimension to view metrics by page, looking for pages that stand out as particularly poor performers.

There are no hard benchmarks for behavior metrics because different types of pages are designed for different levels of engagement. In general, it’s best to benchmark similar pages on your site against each other, e.g., product vs. product, tutorial vs. tutorial, etc.

Tip

If you find some pages that are underperforming, it is most likely due to one of the following reasons:
A mismatch between what is promised by a search snippet and the actual content on the page. In this case, users come to your page with false expectations and leave immediately after they are not met.

Lack of internal linking. You missed an opportunity to make your page part of the sales funnel, and now it has become a dead end, with visitors having no choice but to leave.

Your content is of poor quality or uninteresting.

If you find that your bounce rate is too high, first review the internal links that point to other articles on your site.

Sometimes, a high bounce rate is due to poor website navigation. In this case, consider changing the site structure. Create a simple site structure, and it will be quicker and easier for people to find all your valuable content and for search engines to crawl it.

It’s also bad to bury pages too deep. SEOs recommend that each piece of content be just a few clicks away from the home page.

5. Audience Retention

A more important KPI to measure to optimize performance is the number of visitors returning to your site. As John Mueller has emphasized again, you need more repeat visitors; it’s all about building trust, authority, and brand awareness.

Growing your audience is important; it shows that your website can build long-term relationships.
Audience retention is an important KPI for media and bloggers because it shows how engaged they are with their visitors, whether they like their site and find its content useful.

How to Check

To start, you can get a general overview of your new and returning visitors in Google Analytics under the Audience > Overview tab.

Here you'll find the percentage of sessions that are performed by returning users, pageviews per user, session duration, and other important stats about your website audience.

To dig deeper into this metric in Google Analytics, go to Audience > Cluster Analysis.

Select the user retention metric, set the cohort size, and set the set the time range.

You'll get a breakdown by day, week, or month and the percentage of users who returned to your site. This way, you can measure the best-performing campaigns you've had and see where you can improve.

6. Conversion Rate

A conversion is a completed activity that benefits your business. It can be almost anything - a sign-up, a download, a purchase, or any other action a user takes on your website.

And the conversion rate is the fraction of these actions relative to the total number of visits.

It’s essentially a two-way metric. On the one hand, you can use it to evaluate and optimize your sales funnel design.

On the other hand, you can use it to evaluate the quality of your organic traffic - whether your SEO efforts are attracting relevant visitors who are genuinely interested in your product or service.

How to Check

Log into your Google Analytics dashboard and navigate to Conversions > Overview > Organic Search.
Select All Goals or specific goals from the Conversions drop-down menu.

Select landing page as the primary dimension.

Tip

There are tons of ways to view conversion rate data. Personally, I prefer to filter pages by type, such as blog posts, and compare conversion rates for similar pages. This way, I can see which blog topics are actually adding value to my site and which are just for fun.

One way to track leads and conversions for your SEO keywords is by merging data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

7. Backlink Profile

Backlinks are a major ranking factor, and a good backlink profile is crucial to achieving better search rankings. That’s why you should always keep an eye on your backlink metrics—lose some good links or gain some bad ones, and your rankings will drop.

Tip

The key to monitoring your backlink profile is that you can do damage control in time. If you suddenly lose some quality backlinks, the sooner you contact your webmaster, the better your chances of getting them back.

Similarly, if you gain some bad links, the sooner you disavow them, the less likely you are to be penalized by Google.

8. Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals was recently introduced by Google as an important user experience metric and ranking factor. Currently, there are three ‘vital metrics’ and they all relate to page speed in some way, but Google has hinted at more UX metrics being added in the future.

While there are many other technical SEO metrics out there, I believe Core Web Vitals is a good KPI to have on your SEO planning board as it will soon become the focus of technical optimization.

How to check

Log into your Google Search Console dashboard and go to Experience > Core Web Vitals.
The report tracks technical issues over time, so it’s pretty easy to figure out which site changes caused the problem. If not, the report comes with a list of all detected issues at the bottom of the page.

Another source for Core Web Vitals insights is the Chrome UX Report, which is powered by BigQuery and Data Studio visualizations.

All you have to do is connect the raw CrUX data to Data Studio (here’s a quick explanation of the connector and how to get it working). Users won’t need to create any queries or create charts.

Just enter the URL of the site you want to check. Currently, the dataset has over 4 million sources that provide metrics. If your dataset isn’t there, you’ll get an error message.) A schema page will appear with all the necessary fields.

Hit Create Report, and a bunch of real-world user experience metrics will be presented in a single, convenient dashboard. Eachmetric is explained on the left, and the percentage of pages with this or that performance result is shown on the right.

You can add and remove fields and filters to view analytics for desktop and mobile, or change the date range for analytics.

9. SEO ROI

Last but not least, SEO ROI tells you whether you’re actually breaking even on your SEO efforts. Calculating SEO ROI is a multi-step process, and the difficulty is that search engine optimization is a long-term investment.

Every optimization you make and every piece of content you produce has the potential to pay dividends for years to come. So naturally, making the connection between the benefits you reap and the investment they represent is a bit of a challenge.

How to Check

Log into your Google Analytics dashboard and navigate to Conversions > Overview > Organic Search.
Since SEO has a delayed effect, it’s best to set a date range of at least one year.

Select Ecommerce from the Conversions drop-down menu. This is revenue that is entirely derived from organic search.

Now, go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions and select Organic Search.

This is revenue that is assisted by organic search, meaning users came to your site from a search engine as well as from other sources, so the source is only partially organic. Which of these two sources to use is a matter of personal preference, so I’ll leave it to you.

Add up all of your SEO costs over the past year, including hours you spent, software costs, agency fees, paid guest posts, and any other costs that are relevant in your case.

Take the difference between your annual SEO revenue and your annual SEO spend and divide it by your annual SEO spend. For example, if your annual spend is $100,000 and your annual revenue is $200,000, then your annual SEO ROI is 100%.