So you've built a beautiful looking site and significantly invested in content marketing. Aside from that, you've spent countless hours developing the right buyer personas and finding your target audience.
But do you have any idea about your business marketing performance? What makes your organization's marketing efforts successful?
The key here is understanding what's working and what isn't in your marketing strategy.
That's where Key Performance Indicators (KPI) comes in.
KPIs should be a crucial part of your business' growth strategy. Now is the best time to understand your company's marketing KPIs.
In this post, we'll talk about the ten KPIs you should be looking at when measuring your SEO campaign.
1. Organic Sessions
Google usually separates the kind of traffic that you get in your site into two categories. The first is the traffic that you receive through a search engine result. The other is the one that you receive from referring channels.
Organic search results usually fall on the former. It occurs when a site visitor looks up specific information and arrives on your page based on the relevance of your content.
Take note that organic traffic has always been a crucial KPI. It's because it aligns directly with the very core objective of SEO ‒ getting more viewers to your website.
You can measure your organic traffic directly through Google Analytics and CMS.
Moreover, here are a couple of tactics to improve your organic search results:
link building
keyword ranking
backlinking
publishing content that's relevant to the audience
crafting a meta description with a clear CTA
2. Keyword Ranking
Keyword ranking is an essential KPI because it’s closely correlated with SEO success.
Keyword rankings are where your keywords are positioned on significant search engines like Google or Bing. The closer you are to the top results, the better.
Take note that there are specific keywords that you'll naturally rank higher, like your brand name and long-tail keywords.
Other keywords, on the other hand, must be part of your long-term strategy for you to gain visibility with high commercial intent.
3. Bounce Rate
Bounce rates is another essential KPI because one of the main priorities of search engine algorithms is to satisfy a user’s search query.
So when a user searches for a particular keyword, Google wants to show them the most relevant and high-quality results to resolve the issue.
However, when users bounce back, it's a clear indication that the page isn't relevant, not trustworthy, or frustrating to navigate.
To prevent this from happening, you can routinely audit the pages of your site that has a high bounce rate.
You can also A/B test different approaches and see if the number improves.
4. Average Session Duration
Session duration is the average length of a visit to your site. It's another vital KPI because it shows the quality of your site's content.
So if you would usually see a decrease in session duration, something might have changed that frustrates your audience.
To combat this, focus on creating clear CTAs that compels to turn your target audience into leads, and eventually, into customers.
5. Conversions and Leads
Conversions and leads are essential KPIs because they related closely to the primary business objective of improving your customer base, and attracting more sales.
Now, ask yourself the following questions:
Do you have a site that's easy to navigate?
Are your CTAs clear and prominent?
Are you publishing content that's persuasive and trustworthy?
Can your audience move with the conversion funnel easily?
To improve your results in this KPI, you must focus on two things ‒ user experience (UX) and conversion rate optimization (CRO.)
6. Page Load Time
If a site takes too long to load, chances are, users will bounce back to the search results page.
Visitors are also less likely to convert since their first experience with your site is already frustrating.
Ideally, the page load time of a site usually depends on the complexity of your content and the patience of users. However, most users will abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
That's why it's always important to take in the effect of your site speed in mind. Whether you're uploading a picture or redesigning your site, you need to properly optimize your content, images, and code wherever you go.
7. Top Exit Pages
An exit page is usually the last page the user visits before closing the browser, searching for a new site, or ending a session.
Exit pages aren't inherently harmful. For instance, users can exit on a purchase confirmation page or a thank you page, having a genuinely satisfying experience in your site.
However, if you receive high exit rates on pages that you don't intend to be an exit page, then optimizations are needed.
8. Mobile Usability
Over the past few years, this has been a crucial metric to use especially with the rise of mobile searchers and users.
So if a significant portion of your user base is on mobile, then you should make mobile optimizations your priority instead of a desktop.
It's essential to ensure that the mobile experience that you give to your users are top notch. Track and measure both organic and referral sources that are driving the most traffic.
These, together with a combination of search engines that bring in the most traffic, will help you understand the user path taken to your site.
Moreover, always keep on eye on your website's usability, and make sure users don't encounter any issues when browsing your site.
9. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Have you ever tried loading your site on mobile? Are you generally happy with the site mobile speed?
Chances are if your browsing your site on mobile (especially if you're on-the-go) it means that your isn't speed isn't always fast.
To give your users a mobile browsing experience that's highly optimized, you need to have a standard mobile version of your site with AMP.
The goal of AMP is for you to load your site quickly on mobile. If you regularly publish content, it positively affects your conversions.
10. Crawl Errors
Google Search Console also gives you search errors. To test the crawlability of a page in your site, utilize the “Fetch as Google” tool in the Search Console. Then choose the “fetch and render” option.
Crawl errors can be an error in the server. For instance, Googlebot fails to communicate with the DNS server. As a result, it requests time-out, or your site will be down.
It can also occur at the URL level, like a page doesn't exist anymore, or has a long redirect chain.
So if you notice a spike in crawl errors, it should be addressed immediately.
It's especially true if the crawl errors occur at your server, or if the URL errors significantly affect your primary pages.
Over to You
By regularly checking these metrics, you'll be improving your digital marketing campaign. Aside from that, you'll be able to refine your tactics and know which strategies work the best for you and why.
According to Local SEO Search Inc., one of the best SEO Agency in Canada, “Understanding and monitoring your metrics will help you generate a steady marketing pulse that will help you land more leads and conversions to give you significant profits in the long run”.
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