Monitoring Progress and Evaluating Results in SEO: 10 Important KPIs — Serpstat Blog

Core KPIs in SEO

It is worth noting that every business can have its own key performance indicators for websites. Some focus on sales, while others focus on keeping users informed. For one company, conversion means money coming into an account, while for another, it means a phone call. Therefore, approaches to KPIs tracking will also differ. 

However, all primary search metrics have common features:

• Evaluating the effectiveness. SEO KPIs must be metrics that directly impact a company’s financial results. They cannot be detached from reality — such an approach would make analytics useless.
  
• Employing data-driven decision-making. KPI’s importance lies in the fact that they allow you to plan, based on the past results. SEO metrics should be used to develop plans at all levels — from specific advertising campaigns and immediate initiatives to global marketing strategies.
  
• Applying benchmarking practices. KPI monitoring helps in comparing the business with its closest competitors, segment leaders, and market averages. This helps in determining the company’s position in the market and selecting appropriate development strategies. 
  

These three simple principles will make it easier to choose SEO KPI reports. Focusing on them, you will be able to choose the most accurate, practical, and useful analytics indicators. 

Top 10 SEO Metrics to Track in 2023

We tried to choose universal website KPIs that would be informative for any project. They will be suitable both for internal use and for reporting to clients. However, keep in mind that each business will have its own prioritized KPI metric. Therefore, the final reports should contain not only the basics we have listed but also industry-specific metrics adapted to the principles of a particular company.

1. Organic traffic volume

This key indicator of SEO performance shows how much money the site owner saves using SEO instead of advertising. It allows you to take a step back and evaluate the big picture without going into details. The estimated search traffic calculations (which most SEO services do) are based on SERP positions and the domain keyword search volumes.

This is one of the best KPIs for demonstrating the results of the work done to clients. To get the most out of it, you should examine this figure in the following aspects:

• In dynamics — KPIs tracking in different periods will show the effectiveness of certain decisions.
• In comparison — it is essential to understand the company’s position to develop a policy of interaction with potential customers, partners, and competitors.
  
• In terms of key queries and specific site pages — this will help answer the question of how to measure SEO success and choose priority development areas. 
  

2. Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR is a KPI metric that shows the ratio of the number of clicks to the number of SEO impressions. It primarily evaluates the attractiveness of title and meta-description tags. But in reality, KPI importance goes beyond these two elements. The figure demonstrates the attractiveness of the company’s offer and the idea behind the business.

As with the other most important website KPIs, CTR should be considered in the context of the current market position. To make the analysis as informative as possible, you need to take into account the industry, the nature of the business, and the site’s position in search results. There are no uniform norms, so the goals are set based on the average indicators or the results of the closest competitors. 

KPIs tracking will help you choose the optimal development strategy. If the clickability rate is high, you should focus on maintaining your current position and refuse to make bold experiments. Striving for the ideal often has the opposite effect, you should not fix what is already working well. If the website lags behind most competitors in terms of KPIs, you can try to drastically change the approach to promotion, for example, completely change the style of writing Title and Description.

3. Conversions in organic traffic

If you wonder which key performance indicators are important for your business, do not overlook the conversions. It reflects the site’s performance, summarizing the efforts of marketers, salespeople, administrators, developers, and optimizers. This crucial KPI directly affects the company’s revenue and profits. 

We mentioned above that each company may have different notions of conversion. Therefore, it is essential to determine how to track KPIs in advance. In Google Analytics, you need to open the Admin tab, go to the Events sub-tab, and check the boxes next to all events considered target actions.

When we talk about monitoring SEO performance, absolute and relative conversion rates will matter to us. We mean the ratio of the number of targeted actions to the volume of organic traffic. Evaluating the dynamics of this percentage, you can get valuable information about the effectiveness of marketing policy. 

4. Visibility in search

An important indicator that most KPI trackers ignore is visibility. The gauge of SEO domain visibility quantifies the proportion of potential organic clicks a domain obtains. Serpstat’s algorithm focuses on curating one million keywords across diverse domains. Here’s the breakdown of the process:

1.We compile the keywords for which a domain ranks in the top 20 search results.

2.For each keyword, we retrieve its search volume from the top 20.

3.The search engine traffic is computed by multiplying the search volume of each keyword by the Click-Through Rate corresponding to the domain’s position.

4.The maximum conceivable traffic score is established by aggregating the search volumes of all domain keywords in Serpstat’s database.

5.The domain’s traffic is divided by the maximum possible score.

6.The result is then scaled by multiplying it by 100 to represent the outcome in percentage form.

7.A further magnification is achieved by multiplying by 1000, enhancing the visual representation.

Formula:

This allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of each optimization area separately. There is no uniform standard search engine visibility. It is crucial to consider the segment where the resource operates, possible algorithm changes in dynamic, and position on the SERP.

Tracking the visibility, you can see the potential share of organic traffic. And here, we should emphasize the word “potential.” Visibility does not mean the user will click on the link and, even more so, take a targeted action. Therefore, in SEO, visibility is considered in conjunction with clickability and conversion rate. 

If a site has good visibility but low click-through and conversion rates, it will be a reason for a detailed sales funnel analysis. The KPI importance in this case is that they allow you to see at what stage the system fails. 

In top SEO tools like Serpstat, you can also create custom reports, adapt them to your business model, and observe all the drops and spikes on dashboards. Recently, we have also added GA4 integration to the report.

5. Number of indexed pages

It is one of the important KPIs to consider for SEO of large-scale websites. If the chosen promotion strategy implies the constant publication of new content, you must make sure that search engines index it. Unprocessed pages are a direct loss for the company. They require a lot of attention but, in most cases, do not affect the conversion KPI in any way. In addition, a large percentage of unindexed pages negatively impacts search engine metrics used to rank sites.  

The easiest way to diagnose this is with Google Search Console. To check SEO KPI, you need to find the Index section in the main menu and click on the first item — Pages. Next, you should use the filter by selecting the All Submitted Pages value. This will help exclude pages that are not subject to indexing from the report. 

If a site is large enough and regularly publishes new content, it will always have unindexed pages. Search engines simply won’t have time to process all the new articles. Therefore, to track SEO performance, it is better to use the indicator of the number of unindexed pages to the total number of pages in the Sitemap. The value of this KPI is also noticeable in dynamics — if the percentage is growing, you need to pay more attention to the technical aspects of optimization.

6. Traffic Value

The regular traffic volume reflects the number of visitors who visit the site from different sources. For the optimizer, it is an opportunity to demonstrate the results of their work with one simple indicator and for the site owner — to see the current size of the client base. 

You can measure the traffic volume to your website using simple tools like Google Analytics. If you want to maximize the granularity of SEO KPIs and make your reports more informative, you should consider a specialized platform for digital marketing. 

7. Website rank

It is the position in the search engine for a particular query. You can track the ranking using Google Search Console. However, you should realize that the functionality of the free tool is limited. It only shows search KPIs for a single domain, making analytics a complicated and confusing process. 

If you want to know how to track SEO rankings in the context of the market situation, you should use a specialized service. Serpstat doesn’t just display the top results by regions; it provides insights: history, cached SERP and SERP features of competitors. Looking through its reports, you can see the queries successfully used by competitors, covered by the site optimization strategy.

The “URLs” report possibility is to find the answer to how to track SEO rankings effectively. The results often show queries that are already used for a certain page, but the real page often differs from expected. 

This allows you to optimize each page more thoroughly.