KPIs For Gauging SEO Performance

Key performance indicator (KPI): KPIs are quantifiable measures or metrics that any organisation, regardless of size or niche, can use to gauge performance in terms of meeting their strategic and operational goals. To be effective, KPIs should be linked to a strategic plan which details how the business intends to close the gap between actual performance and target performance.

To improve SEO performance, you must be able to accurately evaluate progress and measure critical success factors. These success factors might include:

• Increasing the number of pages indexed
• Increasing the number of organic visitors per page
• Increasing the number of visitors per keyword phrase
• Increasing yielding pages (percent of pages driving traffic vs total pages).
• Developing unique benefit driven content and calls to action
• Lowering bounce rate
• Increasing conversion rate

KPIs gauge progress toward strategic and operational goals and are unique to each SEO project.

Three basic KPIs every website should chase?

1:Number of Pages Indexed

The number of pages indexed by search engines can provide useful information about your site’s crawl-ability. If the number of pages indexed is much higher or lower than the true number, you may have issues with site architecture or canonical problems.

2: Page Yield

Page Yield is an important metric based on the number of pages driving traffic to your website versus total pages. Page Yield is normally measured and tracked as a percentage on a month by month basis. In our experience, a Page Yield average of around 20 percent is normal, which means 80 percent of your webpages could be freeloaders that do nothing to attract search engine traffic or promote your business.

• Page Yield is key to the length of NSO’s  “long tail”
• The better your Page Yield, the better your SEO program

3: Brand - Non Branded search terms

You should expect to drive traffic from searches that include your brand, however, if the percentage of branded traffic outweighs non branded traffic, then there is room for improvement. Good SEO should also drive traffic based on generic searches. This is traffic that has most likely never heard of your brand but are nonetheless searching for the products or services that you provide.

SMART KPIs Work Best

Without analytics or performance tracking, managing multiple KPIs simultaneously can be difficult. To simplify ongoing tracking and gap analysis ensure that all specifics follow the SMART model:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Result-oriented or Relevant
• Trackable

With KPIs is you gain the ability to pinpoint which actions are positively influencing visitor engagement and conversions.  Without KPIs that target distinct objectives, such as a 20% increase in organic search traffic or a 10% decrease in bounce rate, your SEO/NSO will never reach its true potential.

Our specialists will build a SEO campaign that puts your marketing message in front of potential customers at the precise moment it will have the greatest effect, that is, when they are actively searching online for the products or services you sell. Contact SEO Scotland