Technical SEO KPIs to Monitor in 2020

You’ve successfully created a great website, filled it with great content, and spent hours into SEO marketing and campaigns. People are coming to your website. But now you might wonder, how exactly do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing and campaigns?

You need to evaluate and monitor your SEO KPIs to know if your strategy is working properly. To make it easier for you on which KPIs to focus, I’ve compiled a few important ones to get you started.

SEO

What Are KPIs

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) create a way to measure how well your business is performing. They give focus on strategic and operational improvements when growing your website. In order to efficiently grow your business, you need to make data-driven decisions. KPIs provide the necessary data to make the right decisions.

Another important factor other than KPIs is choosing the right hosting and CMS. WordPress is an excellent option for a CMS as it is excellent for beginners and veteran webmasters alike due to its flexibility.
They also have plugins to help you with analyzing your KPIs. However, for this one, you need a running website – a domain name and to choose a hosting plan.

Most Important SEO KPIs to Monitor

There are thousands of KPIs to choose from, and you can find it hard to choose the right ones for you and instead end up measuring a lot of information that’s not really necessary. I’ve compiled six of the must-have SEO KPIs to funnel down on the KPI choices.

Organic Sessions

This KPI measures, on average, how many pages the users visited during a session. It can also count as repeated views on a single page.

Some elements that define this KPI are:

Visit the website
User actions while on the website
Exit from website

Therefore a single user can be responsible for multiple sessions. Though if the user is idle for more than 30 minutes, their session will time out and they’ll need to reload the page to start viewing again. To know how many visitors (organic traffic) come to your website via organic search, you can use Google Analytics to measure it.

Growth in organic traffic, which results in organic growth sessions, is the most critical KPI as it directly relates to the core of SEO – getting more visitors to your website. This can also indicate the quality of your site and how people navigate through it.

Page Ranking

This measures your current rankings on search engines. It’s crucial to monitor if the keywords that you are targeting move your pages in a positive direction on the SERP (search engine result page) because it directly correlates to the core of SEO.

Here is some factor that can help you maintain or improve your ranking:

Good user experience
Great content
Page Load Times
Optimization for mobile use

Small ranking changes are reasonable; the Google algorithm frequently changes and causes that. But you should monitor it often and look out for significant drops as it may be that your website is not optimized for the new algorithm. You can use tools like Serpstat to keep track of your ranking.

Page Load Times

As mentioned above, this is an important KPI to improve your page ranking. Google always emphasizes on the importance of speed. The majority of users will leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

Whenever you change something on your website, whether it is changing the layout, uploading new contents, pictures, or videos, always keep the effect on speed in mind. Sites like GTMetrix are great for measuring your site’s speed.

Session Length

Session length measures the number of time visitors spends on your site. This KPI is essential because it looks at the quality of your website and your content. The more in-depth your content and site is, the longer you can expect visitors to stay.

If you see a drop in the amount of time spent, you need to find the cause. You can keep these elements in mind to increase the duration of visitors in your site:

Use interactive elements on your website
Create comment sections and engage with the users
Use videos
Add high-quality blog posts

Bounce Rate

This KPI measures the percentage of visitors to your site who bounced/left your website without taking any action. Bounce rate is a crucial factor that is considered as a ranking factor.

Depending on your niche, the bounce rate is usually 40-60%. If the percentage is too high, the search engines will deem your web page irrelevant in the search results. Users will bounce from your website due to your site taking too long to load, providing irrelevant content, or frustrating to navigate.

Your website’s bounce rate can be monitored by using Google Analytics. Look at the overview report to find out which of your pages has a high bounce rate.

Conversions

Now the ultimate goal of your website is to generate leads and conversions. Leads are the target audience interested in your company and the actions were taken by them to establish a sense of communication with you. Here are some examples of leads:

Register for an online conference
Subscribe to the newsletter or blog
Download eBook
Complete a questionnaire

Conversions, on the other hand, are sales or subscriptions that are generated from your leads. You can track both of them by using Google Analytics. They’ll also give you options to set up goal points to track where your visitors finish their session on your website.

Wrapping Up

Monitoring your KPI is extremely important not just for you but for potential investors. You need to frequently monitor your KPIs to know whether the strategy you created is working as they are intended.

There are thousands of KPIs that you can choose from, sometimes confusing you on which to pick. I’ve provided six important KPIs to help you get started in monitoring your performance. Those KPIs are: