Many fellow SEOs and clients frequently ask me about gauging the success of their SEO campaigns. It’s common to see individuals either tracking superficial metrics or being entirely uncertain about which KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to monitor.
In this post, I’ll shed light on the critical KPIs you should prioritize to truly assess your SEO performance.
1- SEO-Sourced Revenue
The most important and impactful KPI to measure is the revenue itself that is coming from your Organic Channel. This directly translates into the impact of your SEO campaigns.
You can measure Revenue coming from Organic Channel by tracking conversions i.e. MQLs (Monthly Qualified Leads), Orders, Transactions on your website.
Tracking Tools like Google Analytics (GA4) will help you measure this KPI under Acquisition (image shown below) & Engagement Reports. This article shows how to track e-commerce conversions in GA4.
2- Organic Traffic
A direct indication of the impact of your SEO Campaign is the Organic Traffic coming to your website. Tracking of Organic Traffic can be done through Google Analytics (GA4) or Google Search Console (GSC).
It is important that Organic Traffic coming to a website is Qualified. It means that the website is generating Traffic through queries that are relevant to the business.
Many a time, I have seen websites generating a tone of traffic by writing on topics that have no relevance to their business. Therefore, no revenue or business value can be generated through such traffic, making it useless or unqualified.
You can use Query & Page filters on Google Search Console (GSC) to filter out irrelevant and unqualified traffic.
3- Keyword Ranking
Rankings, again, are a no-brainer when it comes to SEO KPIs. But the key here is to track only Keywords that are relevant to your business i.e. some sort of Business value can be generated from the Users landing on the site through those keywords.
There are several keyword-tracking tools available in the market. Some common SERP-Trackers are SEMRush, Ahref’s, & Moz. If you are tracking keywords for a large website, you can opt to use specialised Rank Tracking tools such as Advanced Web Ranking (image shown below):
TL;DR: The top 3 KPIs/metrics of SEO-Sourced Revenue, Organic Traffic & Keyword Rankings are critical for you to track and measure in order to determine the success of your SEO efforts.
