How Do You Know Your SEO Is Working?

You spend a lot of time, money and resources on building a strong online presence for your website but how do you know what you are doing is actually working? Is your ranking improving? Is your traffic getting better? And so many other questions that come to mind.

Let’s talk about the key KPIs to track your SEO performance. Here are the top 7 key metrics to look for when measuring your SEo performance:

1. Search Rankings

It’s not a secret the higher your website ranks for the relevant keywords, the better your organic traffic will get.

Search rankings are a crucial KPI because it directly correlates with your SEO success. Once your organic search ranking gets higher on search engines, you’re about to reach the other objectives such as traffic, leads, and conversions.

Tracking your rankings for the right keywords is a must for any SEO campaign. The monthly manual Keyword reports will provide you with the data on your current positions and how much they have changed compared to the previous month. This is a must for every SEO campaign as the main motive behind any SEO campaign is to gain better ranking.

2. Organic traffic

With better ranking we are ultimately trying to grow our website traffic.This is another most important KPI to measure SEO success. There is not much point in improving Search Ranking if the organic traffic doesn’t grow. There are several other factors that affect Organic traffic which we will discuss later in this blog.

This KPI measures how many visitors come to your website from organic search results.

It’s one of the most important metrics to consider, as its growth denotes you reached the main SEO objective: growing the number of people seeing and visiting your website.

3. Organic CTR

Click-through rate (CTR) is a performance metric that measures the ratio of clicks on your link to the total number of users who viewed the search results. In other words, high CTR = high traffic.

CTR is also an important search engine ranking signal. For instance, if your search snippets don’t look appealing enough, even high rankings won’t help you attract more visitors. As a result, your CTR leaves much to be desired. Low CTR will tell search robots your site doesn’t meet users’ expectations, which may result in lower rankings.

Focusing on traffic and rankings, people often make a huge mistake overlooking this KPI. Tracking your organic CTR, you can find out why your high impressions don’t result in significant traffic and fix the problem.This is another key KPI for the Google Paid search as well.

4.Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate measures the percent of your site visitors who bounced from your website without taking any action.Or visitors who didn’t like staying on your website for longer.

This is another crucial metric that is considered as a ranking factor by the search engines. Depending on your industry, a typical bounce rate should be between 40-60%. If the percentage is too high, it’s not good news, it indicates the page is not relevant to the search query.

You can monitor your pages’ bounce rate in your Overview report on Google Analytics to identify which ones result in high rates and try different approaches to see what can help you reduce it.

5.Average session duration

How much time do your visitors usually spend on your website? Do you engage them to stay longer? Average session duration is a prominent metrics you should consider to measure the user engagement on your website.

By monitoring session duration, you’ll be able to assess the quality of your site and understand whether you need to implement any changes into your site structure.

To have a longer session duration, you should build an in-depth content structure for your website.

6.Return on investment

ROI (Return On Investment) is an indicator you can measure for all your marketing campaigns. Calculating ROI for SEO, you’ll determine whether the net income is worth the money you spend optimizing your website.

Here’s the formula to calculate your ROI percentage:

(Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment)

Be aware that it’s common for this parameter to be negative in the very beginning. However, with a successful strategy, you’ll see the positive dynamics within several months.

7. Page Speed

Your Web page loading speed is an important element that affects most of the other metrics. The study by Portent found that when you increase your site’s speed from two seconds to one second, your revenue per page view doubles.

Page speed is not only an important factor for your website’s ranking, but it also impacts some other key metrics like conversion and bounce rates.As a Web page load times go up, the chance of someone leaving your site increases. A website that takes 10 seconds to load means an increase in a bounce rate of around 120%.

Run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights to find out if your site is fast. A score of 100% is fast. A score of 90 or above but not 100% is considered good. If you got 50 to 90, that score needs improvement. A score of 50% or below is considered poor.