9 SEO KPIs to Track for Your Website

If you want to boost your SEO performance, tracking SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) can help alert you to problems your website might be having and strategies that are working that you can apply throughout your site. Like any initiative where you’re investing time, money and resources into your business, measuring and evaluating your efforts with SEO measurement and tracking can help you improve your digital marketing efforts.

The best SEO metrics to track will depend on your business and your online marketing efforts, but there are general SEO KPIs to track that cover an entire website’s performance. If you want the answer to how do you measure SEO success, use these SEO success metrics as your guide.

The Top 9 SEO KPIs to Track

You might consider using the following list of some of the most important SEO metrics for how to monitor SEO performance. As you use metrics for evaluating SEO performance, you can evolve your strategy for better results.

1. Organic Sessions

Organic traffic is the most important KPI for tracking your SEO efforts. An organic session is a website visit that comes from a search on a search engine. It’s not a click from a paid advertisement for your site on another website. People typed in a keyword in a search bar and clicked on the result of your website to find what they were looking for.

Organic sessions are important to measure because they show the impact your website is making in search engines. They show:

• How your on-site keyword targeting efforts are affecting your rankings
• How your off-site SEO efforts, like backlink targeting, are impacting your results
• How users from search engines impact your business, based on the actions they take on your site after visiting

The primary goal of an SEO strategy is to rise up the ranks of search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher you’re ranked, the more traffic you’re likely to get. You can research how your rankings affect the organic sessions of your site and see which pages are bringing you the highest quality traffic and which ones to devote more effort to.

2. New Users

New users are also important to track. You can analyze what sources are driving users to your site and see how they’re interacting with your site once they’re there. New users should be part of content SEO KPIs when you’re using content like a blog to attract visitors to your site.

Like organic visits, better SEO rankings should also positively impact the number of new users to your site.

3. Track Conversions

Conversions are part of SEO engagement metrics. They represent a specific action you want your users to take while they’re on your website. Examples include:

• Downloading an ebook
• Signing up for a mailing list
• Purchasing a product
• Contacting you through a form
• Calling you from your website
• Registering for a webinar or event

Conversions matter because you should be able to assign a monetary value to each one. That helps you better understand your SEO ROI and discover where you should invest more and where you might be losing money.

A conversion like a whitepaper download may not seem like it has a monetary value you can assign to it. But look at what the typical user who downloads a whitepaper does on your site and with your business. If they become a lead, you can estimate a financial value on that part of the pipeline.

If you’re getting visits to a web page but aren’t getting conversions, evaluate how you can position calls to action better for website users. Maybe they’re difficult to find, or maybe your website is difficult to navigate or interact with. You can experiment with A/B testing landing pages to see what’s most effective with your website visitors.

4. Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings are important to track because they show you which keywords perform well for your website and which ones aren’t bringing results. By looking at keyword metrics, you may discover:

• Certain keywords you’re trying to promote aren’t bringing you website traffic.
• Certain keywords you didn’t focus on are bringing you website traffic.
• Your efforts to improve keyword rankings are paying off.
• There are specific keywords that would be worth investing time and strategy into.
• Your competitors have overtaken rankings for keywords you used to rank for.

The Conductor SEO platform has daily keyword rank tracking software so you can see search engine positions for various keywords in real-time. The tool also shows you which competitors are ranking for similar keywords, so you can work to outrank the competition.

5. Bounce Rate and Exit Rate

Bounce rate and exit rate are additional indications of user experience and engagement metrics for SEO. A “bounced” session is when a user only visits a single page on your website and leaves the site without visiting any other pages and without actively interacting with your content. An “exited” session is when a user exits your site after completing some type of interaction such as visiting another page on your website and/or submitting a form.

Depending on your type of business, a high bounce rate or exit rate might not necessarily be a negative from an SEO perspective. For example, if you’re a local restaurant and people are looking at your menu then bouncing, they may be coming into your restaurant to eat there. Other local businesses may see a high bounce rate on their contact page because web users are using the page to call or visit the business. In the case of exit rate, an interested party may visit the homepage then click to the contact page, after which they leave the site, having gotten the information they needed.

With exit rate, also consider the time spent on the page. If people engage for a considerably long time with a page but leave, they may be searching for specific information. If that information leads to them interacting with your business in other ways, a high exit rate may not necessarily be negative.

A bounce rate/exit rate may be of concern when you want people to take further action with your site after they land on specific pages. For example, if you design a landing page that you hope leads to a conversion, but people are bouncing/exiting, you may have the following issues:

• The content doesn’t reflect what the users want to see.
• The content is turning users off from your site.
• Your website is not optimized and has a frustrating user experience. For example, slow site speed and loading time are causing users to leave.

While a high bounce rate/exit rate will not directly affect your page ranking, it is still something that needs to be constantly monitored and improved. Measure bounce rate/exit rate and evaluate what aspects of a web page you could improve upon to create more user engagement.

6. Page Speed Metrics

Your website speed is another key SEO KPI because it directly impacts your rankings, the user experience on your website and whether or not your website is mobile-friendly. As we covered in our Core Web Vitals Readiness Report, search engines like Google use page speed to determine search results. A slow site could keep you out of the top rankings.

It’s important to continually test your site speed to ensure your loading times aren’t negatively impacting SEO. You can use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool (opens in a new tab) to see how your site is performing.

7. Market Share SEO KPIs

What is Market Share? Market Share in Conductor is a type of SEO competitor analysis that reflects the percentage of results brands own across the search engine results pages for your tracked keyword searches. In the report, you can determine whether to see market share data across:

• The top position on your tracked keyword SERPs
• The top five positions on your tracked keyword SERPs
• The first page positions on your tracked keyword SERPs

Learning about your Market Share can help you discover:

• How much real estate your content has earned on the first page of results compared to your competitors
• New SEO competitors for your keywords that might not be your traditional business competitors
• Backlinking opportunities from publishers and news outlets that rank well for a topic

Once you see what your competitors are doing in the SEO space, you can apply their best practices and strategies to your own content to improve your rankings. You can also find websites that might be receptive to linking to your content, which could boost your SEO.

8. Technical SEO KPIs

Certain technical SEO issues may be impacting your performance, even when you have engaging content. You can use the Lumar + Conductor integration to monitor these technical issues within content performance:

• Duplicate content (titles, headers, pages)
• Missing content (titles, headers, descriptions, etc.)
• Redirects
• Pages without canonical tags
• Pages with poor page speed

The above issues could mean the difference between a top-ranking search result and getting buried by the SERPs. Plus, fixing these issues will improve the overall user experience, which could decrease your site’s bounce rate and improve conversions.

9. ROI Metrics

Finally, ROI is the SEO metric that ultimately helps you understand how your monetary investment is working for your SEO efforts. If you’re losing money on the people, agency or SEO platform you’re using for your SEO strategy, you’ll probably want to change what you’re doing.

To measure ROI, you’ll want to look at what you’re investing in your SEO efforts and determine how much revenue you’re gaining from SEO strategy. You can look at your conversion metrics to calculate SEO ROI.

Use Conductor to Track SEO KPIs

Now that you know some of the most important SEO metrics, you can ensure your SEO tracking efforts cover key KPIs and standup to the organic benchmarks of your industry. Conductor’s Google Analytics integration pulls in all of your metrics to track in Conductor. Get easy-to-use dashboards that alert you to SEO issues and see SEO success metrics that you can apply to your strategy to improve your results. Request a demo from Conductor.