It is very hard for you to make sure that whether your SEO campaigns are going toward the right track if you do not monitor the right KPIs.
KPI for SEO, Key Performance Indicator, was born to help you measure the performance of your website. Tracking changes in metrics month over month can give you a detailed and comprehensive picture of the influences of your marketing strategy on business.
In this article, we will dive deeply into the most foundational and vital KPIs for SEO that you have to measure in your SEO reports. Let’s check it out!
1. ROI
ROI stands for Return on Investment – It is the ratio of net profit to total investment costs. ROI is useful for your business goals, especially for SEO when it comes to something specific and measurable.
It is essential to track the ROI of SEO monthly, quarterly, and annually. Because search engine optimization is a long-term strategy, that takes time to see results. You might not get an effective ROI result for the first three to six months. After this period of time, SEO can start to provide you with profits – and continue to boost your income.
The formula for calculating the ROI is ROI = Net Income / Investment Cost.
2. Conversions (Sales and Leads)
Conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors.
For example, if a Shopify store gets 500 visitors in a month and has 100 products sold, then the conversion rate will be 100 divided by 500 or 20%.
The goal of any SEO strategy is to increase search rankings and improve the conversion rate. Because increasing this KPI is the root reason why SEO was born. However, keep in mind that a conversion can be any action you want the user to take, such as comment, like, follow, subscribe, or making a purchase.
Tracking and analyzing conversion rates can help you assess how your SEO campaigns perform and which keywords are generating high conversion value.
3. Sessions
A session is a group of user interactions that take place on a website during a certain period of time. Interactions may include viewing pages on the site or interacting with events, social interactions, and transactions.
A session can be seen as a client’s meeting with the website, including all his or her activities on your Shopify store.
As a KPI for SEO, this metric helps you know the total number of times users interact with the website. If the session increases or decreases, then you can identify the cause of that spike. In addition, tracking and comparing sessions by week and month will help you make reasonable adjustments to your website.
For example, when analyzing this metric, you realize that Facebook source has the most sessions, so you can have a strategy to optimize Facebook sources more to increase traffic and improve the SEO status of your store.
See More: 8 EASY steps of SHOPIFY SEO optimization to TOP 1
4. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the traffic of a website that comes from natural search results through search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
(Paid traffic vs. Organic traffic)
Unlike Paid traffic, when customers click on organic results on search engines, you do not have to lose money like when clicking on ads. This is one of the advantages that most businesses want to get high organic search traffic.
This KPI for SEO is considered a very important source of traffic for a website. They account for a large proportion of the total traffic, improving the reputation of your website. Because search engines always prioritize serving user needs, organic traffic will evaluate the quality of your site.
With Shopify online stores, the higher the organic traffic, the easier it will be to increase conversions and improve sales.
Therefore, don’t forget to track this metric and always find ways to increase organic traffic.
5. Keyword Rankings
Keyword ranking is the position of your website on the search results page when a user searches for a specific keyword. For each different keyword, your website will have a different keyword ranking.
(Example of keyword “SEO service” on Google)
By researching keywords and checking the keyword rankings, you can choose to focus on optimizing the popular topics, which means a large number of searchers are interested in this keyword. If implemented well, it can bring positive results to your website like high organic traffic.
When you check website ranking, you will see which pages have poor performance and get a low position on Google, then it is time to review and re-update them to optimize your SEO-friendly store better.
It is a must to track this KPI for SEO in every SEO analysis.
6. Backlinks
Backlinks (also known as “Inbound Links”, “Incoming Links” or “One-way link”) are links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks as “votes” for a particular page. Pages with high-quality backlinks tend to gain high rankings in the SERP.
The backlink is a very important KPI for SEO. When the website is linked with malicious links yet you don’t know, and then Google detects and issues a penalty. As a result, your website rankings dropped quickly, or worse, could not be found in any search results.
So the first thing you need to do is answer these 3 questions:
- Where can I find all my Backlinks?
- How can I tell if they are malicious?
- How can I contact the owners of malicious backlink sites?
Thankfully, you will get those answers with helpful SEO tools that allow you to check website Backlinks like Google Search Console, SEMRush, Ahrefs, etc.
7. Organic CTR
In SEO, organic click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of searchers who click on an organic result in search engine results pages divided by the total number of searches (impressions) for that term.
This metric will tell you how many people saw your search results, as well as how many people clicked on your page. Organic CTR plays an important role in increasing organic traffic as well as conversion rate.
Organic CTR is mainly based on ranking position but is also influenced by title tag, description, URL, and Rich Snippets presence. If you want to improve this KPI for SEO, please pay more attention to optimize these SEO on-page factors.
8. Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is often simply defined as the rate at which visitors leave a Web page without taking any action, such as clicking a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase.
Bounce Rate is important, for three main reasons:
- Someone exits your site without converting, increasing the Bounce Rate, right? Therefore, when you prevent visitors from leaving, reducing the bounce rate can also increase the conversion rate.
- Bounce Rate can be used as a Google ranking factor. In fact, according to studies, visitor bounce rate has immense effects on page rankings.
- A high Bounce Rate tells you that whether your site (or specific pages on your site) encounters any problem with the content, user experience, page layout, etc., or not.
Bounce Rate is a popular and widely used metric in SEO analytics.
So, the question is “What Is A Good Bounce Rate?”.
Let me clarify it, there is no standard to evaluate the Bounce Rate of a website! Bounce Rate of different types of websites is completely different. For example, if your website is a blog, it is normal for users to enter and read the article and then exit, causing the Bounce Rate to be high. However, if you are running a Shopify store, your Bounce Rate should be between 40% and 55%.
If this metric is over 90% or below 20%, it is a must to check your website and review your SEO strategy.
9. PageSpeed
Pagespeed is the amount of time the content on the page is completely displayed since the user accesses it. It not only directly affects user experience but also Google’s crawling process.
Statistics show that; 82% of users will leave if a website takes too long to load (over 5 seconds), which leads to a high Bounce Rate. Obviously, this bad user experience does more harm to your site than you may be aware of.
In addition, billions of websites on the internet with so much data need to be updated every day. Hence, Google has to set a limited time to crawl a website; to ensure that every website will be updated regularly. If your page load speed is too low, Google cannot update new or edited content on your store timely. In other words, in this fierce SEO competition, you lose.
Therefore, page speed is an essential KPI for SEO, that you should pay attention to track and improve.
We hope that through this article, as a website owner, you can gain more informative knowledge about the essential KPIs for SEO. If you have any questions, please feel free to let us know by contacting us when needed! It is our pleasure to support you.