In order to measure the effectiveness of your content for organic search, it is critical to measure the right metrics that truly reflect the impact of your efforts. This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play. KPIs are essential benchmarks that help you understand how well your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are performing and whether they are aligning with your broader business goals.
Focusing on the right KPIs can provide you with clear insights into your SEO progress, allowing you to make data-driven decisions that enhance your site’s organic search channel performance, user experience, and ultimately, your bottom line. Each measurement offers a unique perspective on your site’s health and effectiveness.
Not all metrics are true KPIs — some can be used to draw insights or as diagnostic information to help improve aspects of your site or content. Diagnostic metrics are adjacent to organic channel performance and should be taken into account for managing an effective SEO campaign. Let’s delve into the core KPIs for SEO and helpful diagnostic data, explaining why they matter and how they can guide your strategy toward achieving your online business objectives.
KPIs for Organic Traffic & Performance
A core measurement of organic search channel performance is traffic. What is organic search traffic? Well, it can be defined as traffic that arrives on the site from any unpaid search source rather than a click from a paid sponsored link in the search results. Traffic is the lifeblood of a website marketing effort, but users still need to engage in conversion activity to affect a business’s bottom line. Let’s jump into what these are and why they’re important to an SEO program.
Sessions
The best way to quantify the amount of traffic to a site or page would be to look at session totals. An organic session begins when a user lands on your website after clicking an organic listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and lasts for an amount of time determined by your settings for measuring them. A single session can consist of several interactions, including multiple pageviews, events, and conversions. For SEO, session totals measure how effectively your pages and content are bringing in organic search traffic to your site from the SERPs.
Sessions Vs. Pageviews
It’s common for pageviews to come up when discussing the best KPIs for SEO. A pageview is counted each time a page on your site is visited. If a user clicked on your organic result for page A, then on a link to page B, then one more to page C, that would be three total pageviews in one session. If the page user then clicked on a link back to page A during the same session, this would still only be counted as three total pageviews in that session. This is because, for a given session, only a single unique pageview is counted.
While we can draw insights from pageviews to understand how users interact with your site (including which pages on your site are most visited and how users are navigating through the site), their totals are based on users who are already on your site. Sessions measure how many times users are landing on your site from the SERPs, which is a better indicator of organic search channel effectiveness.
Sessions Vs. Users
Another metric that comes into question for performance measurement is user totals. A user is simply an individual who has visited your site or page. User totals count the number of unique visitors, so a repeat visitor would still only count as one user. One could break this down further and differentiate between users and new users, which counts the number of visitors that are arriving on your site for the first time within a given period.
Session totals tend to be higher than user totals, and this can be because the same user might visit a site or page multiple times, triggering multiple sessions. This could indicate that the user finds your content helpful and engaging enough to repeatedly return to your site, which is great. For this reason, sessions would be a better indicator of SEO performance over a total user count, new or otherwise. Ultimately, you should evaluate your SEO goal to determine which metric to measure and why.
Conversions
Regardless of channel attribution, all marketing efforts are about improving the bottom line. Conversions will vary based on your industry and business type but are the key measurement of how a channel contributes to business goals. An ecommerce website may be more concerned with transaction and revenue totals, whereas a lead generation-based business may be tracking phone calls or form submissions. It’s important to establish a clear idea of your critical conversion measurements if you haven’t already.
Diagnostic Metrics for Organic Search
Outside of KPIs, there are plenty of data points available to analyze in the realm of SEO. While they may not be true measures of performance, some metrics can serve as diagnostics for troubleshooting or evaluating performance anomalies. Here are some of the most relevant diagnostic metrics for organic search.
Clicks
Unlike sessions, which are counted in Google Analytics, click data comes from Google Search Console. This data source is as close to the horse’s mouth as you can get for data about Google organic SERP performance. We could write an entire article about the difference between Google Analytics and Clicks in Search Console (and we have). Here, we need to understand that sessions are measured differently and that Google Analytics receives data from multiple sources, like Bing and Duck Duck Go, and not just from Google SERP activity. Neither is better or more accurate than the other; they’re just different, and both should be analyzed when measuring performance. Considering both metrics can be especially helpful in outlier situations, where you may need to troubleshoot a discrepancy or analyze unusual changes in performance.
Impressions
Impressions measure the number of times a website has appeared in the SERPs. Visibility can be a victory, but the context of those impressions reveals the true value of where and when we appear in the SERPs. After all, an appearance in position 99 or at position 9 each counts as one impression. While increased impressions are always welcome, when we analyze the keywords that are driving the impressions, the positions they appear for, the associated pages, and if clicks are occurring on those terms, we get a better understanding of where our organic visibility is potent and where it needs to be fine-tuned.
Diagnostic Metrics for Site-Side User Behavior
Once a user has landed on your site, measurement becomes more related to a user’s experience with your pages and overall engagement. Let’s look at the most relevant metrics for user behavior and the organic search channel.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
Clickthrough rate calculates the percentage of users who click on a page that has appeared in the SERPs. For a given page, this can be calculated as: Clicks ÷ Impressions = CTR. A common question I get about the CTR is: What is the average or industry standard CTR that we should be aiming for? A quick search will yield different ideal percentages. However, trying to achieve a seemingly arbitrary percentage can be unhelpful and, depending on where performance is, unrealistic. Because there are so many variables involved across so many different websites, it is far more beneficial to use this metric to measure your own progress based on the timeline of your SEO efforts.
Bounce Rate
A “bounce” happens when a user lands on your website from the SERPs and then leaves (clicking the “back” button, closing their browser, etc.) without visiting any other page or interacting with the site. The bounce rate can be calculated by taking the total number of “bounces” and dividing it by the total number of sessions.
A high bounce rate can be an indicator that a user didn’t find what they were looking for, poor UX design, or that your page loads too slowly, or another unforeseen technical issue. Also, a bounce doesn’t necessarily mean the user didn’t engage with the content. If a visitor spends a long time reading a page but doesn’t click further, it’s still counted as a bounce. Use the bounce rate as a starting point for investigating page experience rather than as a KPI.
Diagnostic Metrics for Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings are important to organic search, even if they’re not key indicators of SEO performance. After all, you have to rank before you can get clickthrough from the SERPs, but the fact that you rank doesn’t guarantee that searchers will click your organic search listing.
Still, keywords can be used to analyze changes in organic search activity that can help inform SEO strategies and understand the effectiveness of SEO content. Here are the two that I discuss most frequently for understanding changes in keyword performance.
Average Ranking Position
The average ranking position is a metric found in the Search Console that provides the average ranking based on all keywords a site or page appears for in a given period. While it’s a nice high-level metric, this doesn’t reveal much about keyword performance.
As an example, a site may rank in the top 10 for its converting, transactional-type keywords; but rank in the 90’s for non-critical supporting keywords. In this situation, the average would not accurately show how positively the program is performing. While a good average is ideal, it is both rare and uninformative. Actually, it is more beneficial to delve into how keyword positioning is changing to draw meaning from it.
Total Ranking Keywords
The number of ranking keywords totals can tell a lot about the relevancy of the content on your site, and can also be a general indicator of overall site health. As an SEO program optimizes the content on a site, it is common to see the number of keyword rankings increase. After all, in order to rank for a keyword, a page or site must have content that Google perceives is relevant for the given keyword.
However, much like with every other metric, a deeper dive into keyword rankings is where we find more meaningful insights. While tracking the overall total is good, tracking how keywords are moving within those totals can be more helpful. How many keywords moved into or out of the top three positions? Are there any transactional keywords for which we are ranking on page two, on the cusp of performance? Since it takes time for search engines to crawl, index, and rank new content, and since keyword positions can change day-by-day naturally, it would be more efficient to check your keyword holdings at least once a month, paying special attention to how the positions are changing within the totals, aside from the totals themselves.
Understanding and monitoring the right KPIs for SEO is crucial for optimizing your website’s performance and achieving your business goals. Each metric offers valuable insights into different aspects of your site’s SEO health and user experience. By focusing on these diagnostic metrics and KPIs, you can make informed decisions that not only improve your search engine visibility but also enhance user satisfaction and drive meaningful results. Remember, SEO is not just about ranking higher; it’s about creating a site that serves your audience effectively, leading to sustainable success.
