Indispensable for the success of your marketing, your SEO strategy requires regular monitoring. To know if your SEO serves your business objectives, defining key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential.

But which metrics to monitor? If the answer depends mainly on your objectives, here is a selection of 10 essential KPIs to follow to improve your SEO!

1. Organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to visits to the site from search engines (such as Google or Bing ). It does not include paid traffic, only natural inbound requests.

No matter what your goal is, this is the most vital metric to consider, as its growth shows that your SEO strategy is working.

 

2. Your ranking on target keywords

How do your pages and articles rank on the previously determined keywords?

If you have an SEO strategy, you have determined important queries in your industry. Usually, your content aims to position you on these relevant queries.

Tracking rankings based on targeted keywords help you tailor your marketing actions. For example, if you are not very present on a crucial expression, you will know that it is necessary to produce more content on this subject, conduct net linking campaigns around this term, etc.

3. Leads and conversions

The central point of your key performance indicators, conversions help you analyze the relevance of your positioning. Indeed, there is no point in getting many visitors if they do not turn into prospects or customers.

It’s up to you to determine the purpose of the conversion based on your goals. This could be downloading a white paper, signing up for the newsletter, signing up for a trial offer, or purchasing a product.

 

4. The bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of users who have left your website immediately after opening a page. It is determined by dividing the number of non-interactive sessions by the total number of sessions.

To know
A typical bounce rate is between 40 and 60%. If the percentage is too high, it means the page is not, or has ceased to be, search-worthy.
In addition, it is a measure considered as crucial by the search engines. If your bounce rate is too high, you risk losing place in the results.

 

5. Average duration of a session

By monitoring the duration of the sessions, you will be able to assess the overall quality of your site. If visitors are spending little time on your pages, the user experience needs to be reviewed. However, ergonomics and fluidity of navigation are essential factors for SEO.

 

6. The number of pages visited per session

This KPI gives you an overview of the number of pages a user visits, on average, during a session.

A high page-per-session rate means your internal linking efforts are paying off. The opposite proves that users have difficulty finding the information they are looking for.

7. The backlinks

Essential KPI, the volume of backlinks and their quality, weighs on the success of your SEO strategy. Poor quality links hurt your site’s authority and drop its rankings. Conversely, inbound links from high authority sites promote your SEO.

Remember to regularly check the referring domains to quickly detect opportunities or, on the contrary, threats to your positioning.

 

8. Page speed

The “mobile-first” trend is very present. So as much to say that the speed of the pages has become a key factor for the success of your SEO strategy. Depending on the complexity of your page, this time may vary, but if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, that’s terrible news.

Every extra second fuel the bounce rate and negatively impacts your SEO.

 

9. Organic CTR

Click-through rate (CTR) measures the ratio of clicks on a link to the total number of impressions. High CTR = high traffic. It’s an important ranking signal for search engines and you!

By monitoring this rate, you can assess the quality of your titles and meta descriptions. Elements that influence clicks!

 

10. Crawl errors

The crawl errors occur when trying a search engine to reach a page on your website without success.

If your page is not accessible to the search engine robot, it is invisible to them, and therefore to your potential visitors.

Crawl errors are accessible from the Crawl Stats tab in the Google Search Console and should be monitored regularly.

 

By monitoring these KPIs, you can better drive your decisions and improve your ranking. However, do not hesitate to determine other indicators in connection with the objectives of your company.

Entrust the audit of your SEO and the management of your SEO to my team of professionals at ufound.