SEO KPIs : Search Engine Optimization Performance Indicators

Organic traffic : the result of your strategy

The most studied and analysed seo KPI is without doubt organic traffic. It can be seen as the “final” seo KPI since it represents the gains of your SEO strategy. To have a better visibility of your results, it is important to determine dates and periods of comparison. There is no point in knowing whether you have made 1000 or 10000 visitors of organic traffic. It is more important to know if you have achieved 70% of organic traffic compared to the previous month, or last year.

 

Keyword positioning : the essential SEO KPI

The second kpi seo discussed is keyword positioning. The positioning of your SEO keywords is the performance indicator to follow for all sites. It allows you to situate your website in relation to your seo competitors. Thus you will find your ranking in the search results on a given keyword. To know which keyword to follow, it is necessary to carry out a seo audit, more precisely a semantic audit. It aims to guide you on the keywords of your activity, your products or services on which it is necessary to position yourself in order to acquire qualified seo traffic.

The positioning of keywords must be done regularly: once a month minimum. It is useless to look at this kpi seo every day, since the ranking of the SERP is constantly changing, and that the gain of place on Google takes time depending on the case and the competition.

Our seo expert advice : make a list of your main keywords to watch out for, the words on which you should concentrate your efforts and which best represent your business to users. Monitor this list regularly to measure the performance of your actions: Onsite, netlinking and adding seo content.

 

SEO visit duration: the KPI for the relevance of your content

Once you know where you stand and how much organic traffic you have, you can’t stop there. Creating seo content is one thing, but is it interesting for your customers? To measure this, nothing could be simpler : you need to track the seo kpi which is the duration of organic visits.

The duration of visits determines the interest your visitors have in your content and your website. The longer the content, the higher the seo kpi is likely to be. However, be careful : a 6,000-word article may be less interesting than a 1,500-word seo article. You need to find a balance between quantity and quality content, simple and easy to read. Your level of writing, the structure of your pages, the tone you use all influence the duration of SEO visits.

You can go further with this kpi seo, and extend it to your entire website. To do this, you need to track the average time per session. This performance indicator aggregates the time spent on all your pages and user sessions from the different acquisition channels.

 

Page load speed

Another kpi seo to watch out for is the loading speed of your website pages. As you know, time is money, but also SEO. Page load speed has a big influence on search engine ranking. The slower a page is, the more discredited it is in the eyes of Google. Remember that Google strives to provide quality web content to its users, so it makes sense that content that loads quickly will be highlighted.

If your site is slow, don’t neglect optimisations. They are generally quick to implement and the gain in terms of natural referencing is significant. The most common mistake is the weight of images that slow down the loading of a page.

Our seo expert advice : aim for a page load time of 2s, which is the time recommended by Google. Use images with a maximum weight of 150kpo, and set up a cache. If you have a wordpress site, there are many free and easy to install caching solutions.

 

CTR : the SEO KPI that measures your attractiveness

What is CTR? The CTR is the click rate on a search result. It is evaluated by the calculation : (number of clicks/number of impressions)*100. The closer the result is to 100, the higher your CTR and the better your performance.

The CTR has an influence on natural referencing, it helps Google to determine the attractiveness and quality of your pages. The better your site, page or article is positioned on Google, the more likely you are to have a high click through rate. The best way to have a high CTR is to have position 1, or 0. Position 0 takes up a lot of space in the SERPs : your article cannot be missed.

The CTR influences the SEO position, and vice versa, so this kpi seo can be worked on “naturally” thanks to the gains in positions, and in a more manual and precise way via work on the meta title and description.

Our SEO expert advice : if your CTR is low, carry out a quality control of your meta title tags (this is the title visible in the search engine results). A good meta title tag should contain your keyword and give the user the opportunity to learn more about the subject.

Customers from seo traffic

Generating natural traffic is the main mission of a seo agency, but it is necessary to go further than just organic traffic statistics. A good seo agency like Doko aims to generate quality traffic, the goal being to make sales, bookings, orders, contacts.

To check if your traffic is qualified, you need to track the following seo kpi : conversions from organic traffic. This will allow you to analyse the distribution of your conversions according to the traffic sources of your website.

 

Referring domains and backlinks: the KPIs of netlinking

It is impossible to talk about SEO without mentioning netlinking and link building. Netlinking is one of the pillars of natural referencing which consists of creating links to a site. Creating links is a fact, but it must be done intelligently. To do this you need to monitor 2 main indicators, namely :

• The number of referring domains
• The number of backlinks

The power of a domain (website) is related to the number of referring domains and links. Know that a site with 10 referring domains and 10 links, will be more powerful than a site with 1 referring domain and 10 links. The aim is to maintain a fair ratio between referring domains and links.

Follow the evolution of your links using the netlinking tool (see the dedicated section at the bottom of the article). We will not go into detail on the netlinking part, for more information go to our article dedicated to netlinking.

 

Duplicate content rate : avoiding google penalties

Duplicate content is a danger for all websites. As a reminder, duplicate content is content that has been taken from one site and published on another with little or no modification. But duplicate content can also be present internally : repetition of the name of a product sheet, meta description and other.

This kpi seo is more difficult to find since it is necessary to be equipped with specialized seo tool and very often paying. Even if free solutions exist. Be aware that you must have a duplicate content rate as close as possible to 0. If all of your content is duplicated, or has been stolen, Google may penalise you with a loss of referencing, or in extreme cases, a manual penalty resulting in the blacklisting of the site in question. You must take into account that each content must be unique, do not miss this metric.

 

SEO KPI tools : the essentials

Knowing the seo kpi to follow is a good start, but you still need to know where to find them. Here is a summary of SEO tools to obtain key performance indicators and analyse the different keys to seo success.

 

Google Analytics to analyse user behaviour

Google analytics will be the nerve centre of your seo data study. It is the most widespread data analysis solution on the web, simple to install and configure, Google Analytics allows you to track your site’s user data in a comprehensive manner.

You can therefore find different seo KPIs such as :

 

• Organic traffic
• Traffic distribution
• Time spent per page
• Time spent per session
• SEO conversion and other levers
• Page load times

 

Take the time to explore the different headings and sections to understand what is happening on your site.

Our seo expert advice: go further than the first charts and tables proposed, set up filters and secondary dimensions.

 

Google Search Console : know your CTR and more

Another tool from Google to track your seo kpi is Google Search Console, also known as GSC. It allows you to track your performance, as well as the keywords that generate traffic. It’s a good tool for tracking positioning if you’re just starting out, but for more advanced tracking use a specialised seo tool like SEMrush or AWRcloud.

The seo kpi that will interest us the most on the GSC is the CTR. You can track it on your entire site or page by page by entering the URL of your pages. You can also set up ascending and descending filters/rankings to improve the click-through rate of the most troubled pages. This tool can also monitor the click-through rate by device: computer, mobile and tablet.

 

Screaming Frog : the free onsite seo tool

Screaming frog is a seo crawling tool, it can be used to know and detect your duplicated contents. It can crawl a site and retrieve all the information such as :

 

• URL
• Hn tag
• Meta description
• Meta title
• Number of characters
• Code status : 200, 301, 404
• Canonical URL

 

This seo tool is reserved for a public with good web and seo knowledge. It is less intuitive than other seo and SaaS tools such as SEMrush and KWfinder, but it is very effective and can be used free of charge within certain limits : ideal for sites with less than 200 pages.

 

 

Majestic SEO for SEO KPIs on netlinking

Let’s go back to the nerve of SEO: netlinking. This is one of the essential seo tools for successful SEO : Majestic SEO.

You can analyse the netlinking part of one or more sites, so you will find your number of referring domains and backlinks. Of course the tool goes much further than that, it gives an index on the quality and quantity of domains and links of the analysed site.

 

SEMrush : KPI on positioning

To track the SEO ranking of your website, you can choose a tool like SEMrush. It gives you your current and past positions (within a certain limit). You can group your positions in different categories:

• Top 1
• Top 3
• Top 10
• Top 20 and so on

Our seo expert advice : work on your keywords in positions from top 3 to top 20, you will get more results than by concentrating your efforts on a keyword in position 50.

 

Analyse SEO KPIs

Once you have your seo kpi in hand and their data, you need to analyse them. The analysis allows you to measure the impact of your actions and that of Google (such as an update of the algorithm for example).

Set yourself objectives to give meaning to your seo KPIs such as a number of visits to be reached, a keyword positioning in 1st position, a loading speed to be reached in 3 months. A single figure without context is not important. You need to make comparisons between given periods. Here are some examples of comparisons :

 

• Monthly
• Quarterly
• Yearly

 

The aim is to be able to tell whether you have been able to achieve your objectives or not by analysing your success indicators in an intelligent way

Create reports, preferably monthly, so that you can consult your performance indicators regularly and in an automated way (as much as possible). Collecting is a tedious task, so opt for an automatic collection process, but analysis requires an expert eye. Doko seo agency supports its clients with tailor-made SEO KPI reports and individual analyses to be able to adapt the strategy according to the needs and performance.

 

Question and answer on performance indicators

What are the kpi seo tools?

SEO tools are varied, free or paid, the main thing is to choose a tool adapted to your SEO project. These include Google Analytics, SEMrush, AWR, Screaming Frog and Majestic SEO to name but a few.

What is a kpi seo?

A seo KPI, or performance indicator, is a metric, a piece of data that allows you to evaluate the performance of SEO actions. It can be a number or percentage of web visitors or positions on Google for example.