Top SEO KPIs Every Marketing Team Should be Tracking

What are SEO KPIs?

SEO KPIs are metrics used to assess the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. They help you understand how well your website is performing in terms of visibility and engagement on search engines like Google and Bing.

Why are KPIs important for SEO Performance?

By tracking certain SEO KPIs, you can make well-informed decisions about how to adjust your strategy, optimize your content, and improve your website's overall performance in search engine results. Here are a few reasons why they are important:

Measure Success: KPIs allow you to quantitatively measure the success of your SEO efforts. By tracking specific metrics, you can see whether your strategies are improving your website's visibility and attracting more traffic.

Identify Improvements: By analyzing KPIs, you can identify areas of your SEO strategy that are not performing as expected. This helps you make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts for improvement.

Align SEO with Business Goals: KPIs link SEO activities to business outcomes. For example, tracking conversions from organic traffic can demonstrate how SEO contributes to overall business revenue or lead generation.

Optimize Resource Allocation: KPIs help you understand which SEO tactics are yielding the best results, allowing you to allocate resources more effectively and focus on strategies that offer the highest return on investment.

Benchmarking: KPIs enable you to benchmark your performance against past results or industry standards. This is crucial for setting realistic goals and understanding your position in the market.

Reporting: KPIs provide a clear, concise way to report SEO success to stakeholders. This is important for transparency and for demonstrating the value of SEO within a larger marketing strategy.

Adapt to Changes: SEO is a dynamic field, with search engines constantly updating their algorithms. KPIs help you monitor the effects of these changes on your site so you can adapt your strategies in a timely manner.



By closely monitoring SEO KPIs, you can ensure that your optimization efforts are not only keeping pace with the evolution of search engines but are also effectively contributing to your company's overall success.

Performance Evaluation & Strategic Decision-Making

To put this into perspective, let’s say you're trying to improve your fitness, but you haven't tracked any of your previous workouts or diet habits. It's like deciding to run a marathon without knowing how far you can currently run or what your baseline fitness level is. Without understanding your current state or having any historical performance data, it's difficult to plan an effective training regimen or see the incremental benefits of changes to your exercise or diet. Just as in fitness, in business, knowing your starting point is crucial for setting realistic goals and measuring progress effectively.

Long story short, understanding your current website position is crucial for planning where to take it next. The same holds true for historical data. Without historical performance data to look back on, it's tough to tell how effective any new changes or initiatives might be. It's all about having that starting point to make your plans solid.

To give an example, let’s consider lead generation. Is receiving 25 organic leads a month impressive or disappointing? Honestly, it depends. For a new online presence or a small brand, 25 leads might be a strong start. However, if you’re averaging 250 leads monthly over the past year, then suddenly dropping to 25 indicates you have a significant issue.

This is where SEO KPIs come into play. They offer a historical baseline that enables you to evaluate your current outcomes and predict future performance.

Top 10 KPIs to Track

Now for the moment you have all been waiting for... drumroll please—the list of the top KPIs every marketing team should be tracking. If you're new to tracking SEO KPIs, or if you're uncertain whether the ones you're tracking are delivering the insights you need, these performance metrics are an excellent starting point:

1. Organic Traffic: This is the number of visitors coming to your website through search engine results pages (SERPs) without paid promotions. It's a direct indicator of SEO performance and the effectiveness of your content strategy.

Allie's Pro-Tip: Prioritize quality content over quantity. High-quality content that truly meets the needs of your audience will ensure your content is not only informative but also engaging, relevant, and provides real value. This will help improve your site’s relevance and authority, which are crucial for SEO.

2. Keyword Rankings: Monitoring where your keywords rank on SERPs is crucial. This KPI helps determine how visible your content is to potential customers searching for those specific terms.

Allie’s Pro-Tip: Tracking the performance of your competitors’ keywords can help you better understand where you are lacking in the market. How you stack up against the competition can provide valuable insights into market trends and help you identify opportunities to refine your SEO strategy.

3. Click-Through Rate (CTR): This measures the percentage of users who click on your website after seeing your link in the search results. A high CTR indicates that your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs are appealing and relevant to your target audience.

4. Bounce Rate: This metric represents the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate is a warning sign that demands attention. It may indicate that the content is not relevant or that the user experience is poor.

5. Conversion Rate: This measures how effectively your organic traffic leads to desired actions, such as purchases, form fills, or other goals. This KPI is crucial for evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of your SEO efforts.

6. Page Loading Speed: Page speed affects both user experience and Google’s ranking algorithms. Faster pages typically engage users better and rank higher in search results.

Allie’s Pro-Tip: An easy way to improve page load speed is by optimizing photos and videos without losing quality. 

7. Backlinks: The number and quality of backlinks pointing to your site from other websites. Backlinks are a significant factor in how search engines evaluate the authority and relevance of your site.

We’ll leave the topics of link building and how to get backlinks for another blog post, but as you measure them, look for:

• Number of backlinks
• Number of domains providing backlinks
• How the number of backlinks increases or decreases over time

8. Engagement Metrics: These metrics include average time on site, pages per session, and return visitors. If your metrics are high in these areas, keep up the good work! High engagement rates are viewed favorably by search engines and can lead to higher rankings.

9. Device Traffic and Usability: Tracking where most of your traffic comes from and assessing how effective the mobile, tablet, and desktop versions of your site are at engaging users is important for user experience. With the increase in mobile device usage, having a mobile-friendly website should be at the top of your priority list.

Learn more about user experience here >>> 

10. Return on Investment (ROI): Inbound marketing strategies such as SEO might seem difficult to quantify in terms of ROI because you're not directly paying for ads, and results aren’t immediate after you publish new content like landing pages or blog posts.

However, by using appropriate analytics tools, you can accurately track which clicks, conversions, and revenue are generated through organic search over several months.

All Summed Up

So here are 10 of the most important SEO KPIs to help your clients climb the organic search results and capture more high-quality traffic.

Monitoring these SEO KPIs will provide your marketing team with critical insights and guidance on your website’s performance and highlight areas that need improvement. By focusing on these metrics, you can fine-tune your strategy, enhance your online presence, and achieve substantial growth in your organic search results.