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Search engine optimisation. It’s never easy, is it? While winning the SEO game – and landing at the top of the Google search rankings – has always been a challenge, the difficulty has been elevated to another level in 2024. Fortunately, there are ways to increase your chances of success.
One is by knowing which SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) to track.
If you’re wondering how to measure SEO success, these KPIs are the answer. They are measurable valuables that indicate how effectively your company is achieving key objectives. There’s just one question: What KPIs should you be tracking?
As a specialist SEO consultancy agency, we have the answers below!
Why are you going through the trouble of SEO? One answer: search visibility. It’s all about getting your brand found through relevant Google searches. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise the first SEO KPI to track is search visibility.
High visibility means your website is more likely to be clicked on, driving organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page.. Low visibility means the opposite – and an SEO audit might be in order. Ultimately, this metric indicates your site’s competitiveness in search rankings, which helps to understand the effectiveness of your SEO strategies.
Organic traffic is important. However, this traffic isn’t worth much if it is not converting. This is why, when it comes to SEO KPIs to track, organic traffic conversions must be near the top of the list. This KPI measures the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action – think a purchase or newsletter sign-up – after discovering your site through organic search.
A high conversion rateA conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that take a desired action on your site. indicates your SEO strategy isn’t just effective for generating traffic, but also able to attract visitors likely to convert. By analysing this website KPI, you are able to gauge the ROI of your SEO efforts. Moreover, you can see which content routes are the most lucrative and refine strategies to improve the overall user journey.
With KPIs for SEO, backlinks stand out from the crowd. This is due to the importance of the link-building process. The quality and quantity of backlinks are essential indicators of your website’s trustworthiness and expertise in your field. Fail to pack in a hefty quantity of relevant, high-authority linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages., and you won’t have a big enough signal to be found by the search engines.
Tracking backlinks helps you understand your site’s perceived value in the overall SEO landscape. It also guides your content strategy, including whether an increase in backlink numbers is a necessity to propel up the search rankings.
You might be successful in pumping up those visitor numbers for your site, but this doesn’t mean much if you have a high bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who visit only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not satisfied with your website.. In fact, it suggests either your content is irrelevant, you’re delivering a poor user experience, or it is a combination of the two. Neither situation is good, meaning a revision of your on-page SEO is in order.
Including bounce rate as part of your SEO KPI reporting allows you to identify issues – if any – with specific pages or your content on the whole. Suppose the bounce rate is low; great. It’s essentially a virtual pat on the back that you’re doing things right. However, if it’s on the high side, you can use it as a guide to refine your efforts.
In the KPI rankings, another that is important to track in 2024 is your site’s speed. Page load time is vital for SEO as it directly impacts user experience and search engine rankings. Sites that load quickly deliver a better user experience, reducing bounce rates while increasing visitor engagement.
Google prioritises faster-loading pages in their ranking algorithms, where they recognise speed as a key aspect of user satisfaction. Monitoring your page load time assists with identifying – and rectifying – issues that may slow your site down. Technical SEO audits can further help in that regard and push towards maximising performance.
The number of indexed pagesIndexed Web Pages are web pages that have been discovered by search engine crawlers and added to their databases. is another of the best SEO KPIs to track, at least, in certain situations. Most sites don’t have any issues with Google crawling and indexing their pages in a timely manner. However, operating a complex, large site can be a different story.
When you fall in the latter category, the number of indexed pages is a crucial KPI. SEO performance can be massively hindered if new and updated content isn’t being indexed. By understanding if the search engines are successfully crawling your site, this is one point of your technical SEO you can be comfortable is working correctly.
For a successful SEO strategy in 2024, you need to track a range of website KPIs like bounce rate and page load time. These metrics deliver valuable insights into user engagement, website performance, and content visibility. The result: you can make targeted improvements to your website and its content for greater SEO performance.
Need help with putting together an SEO KPI report? Perhaps you have done the research into these KPIs, but you’re struggling to put the gained insights into action? Our SEO services can help. By partnering with an expert marketing agency, you can guarantee all of these must-have KPIs are managed correctly – and ultimately support your business growth.
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