How Can You Track & Measure SEO Performance?

If you’re committing time and resources to SEO, you’ll want to know how successful your efforts are. This is where measuring SEO performance comes in. It lets you determine the impact of your optimizations. 

So, when measuring SEO performance, you are ultimately determining your ranking. However, there are other crucial aspects to consider and assess.

We recommend tracking these eight variables to help you analyze your SEO success.

What is SEO Tracking?

SEO tracking is the monitoring and analysis of organic search performance using quantitative data. 

SEO tracking makes it easier to assess whether certain improvements or SEO efforts are helping you achieve your business objectives. Discover key insights you can use to improve in the future. 

If you’re performing SEO for a company or customer, measuring SEO performance can help you demonstrate the value of your efforts to key stakeholders. This might lead to increased acknowledgment of your efforts. And perhaps even more resources for future SEO projects.

8 Metrics to Measure Your SEO Performance

The KPIs you measure for SEO should be directly tied to your company’s objectives. To get you started, here are some of the most popular SEO KPIs analyzed by marketers:

a. Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings indicate where your website ranks in search results for certain keywords.

For example, the following website ranks first for the term “puppy barking in crate.” 

Many SEO initiatives try to achieve higher rankings for certain keywords. The better your keyword ranks, the more likely you are to get organic traffic (unpaid traffic from search engines). 

So it’s a good idea to keep track of your target phrases.

Ideally, you should continually track your target keywords. This helps you to detect variations and respond appropriately.

b. Position in SERPs

As part of measuring SEO performance, keep track of where your website ranks in SERPs (for relevant search queries). Each page features 10 blue links (organic results that exclude featured snippets, information boxes, and advertisements), and your goal is to appear as high on the page as possible.

When viewing reports, the results at the top of the page will be represented by a lower number. For example, the top result on the first page will be reported at position 1, while a result halfway down the page will be shown at position 5.

You can track your average overall position (but keep in mind that lower page rankings for less relevant keywords can significantly lower this metric), the rank of your website for specific keywords (that you know are important for your brand), the position of branded keywords compared to unbranded keywords, and even the distribution of your SERP rankings, all to increase your first and second-page rankings.

c. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the number of people who come to your website by clicking on unpaid search results (i.e., not through a sponsored ad).

To check the overall number (measured in clicks), go to the “Search results” report under “Performance” in Google Search Console: 

This is a common metric for measuring SEO performance. It indicates the number of people visiting your website.

So it’s a good idea to monitor how your organic traffic varies over time.

There are several ways to accomplish this. Depending on the purpose of your campaigns:

• Organic traffic by page: This is the number of organic visits to a certain page on your website. If you’re optimizing content or creating backlinks to a certain page, you should keep track of this. To determine if your optimizations were successful.
• Organic traffic by keyword: The number of organic visitors to your website from a given search keyword. This is necessary to determine whether your SEO strategy targets terms likely to convert or drive profitability.
• Organic traffic by domain: This is the total amount of organic visits to your domain. You may use this to assess the impact of SEO actions on your entire website. Consider modifying the structure of your website.

Evaluating organic traffic based on these categories will help you understand which optimization efforts are most effective.

d. Impressions

Impressions are another metric to consider when measuring SEO performance. When you appear in search results for a user’s query, you get an impression. While many SEOs focus on ranking at the top of the SERPs, keep in mind that you’re just looking to boost your chances of being noticed by a user.

Impressions might be useful in determining the efficiency of the keywords for which you appear. After all, having a first-page position for a certain query is of little use if it does not bring your website in front of potential visitors.

If you have a first-page position but few impressions, it’s possible that the term you’re ranking for has low search traffic and isn’t the most beneficial for your website.

You can simply track impressions with Google Search Console. However, if you simply want to track the impressions of a certain set of keywords, you will need to collect this data manually.

e. Engagement Rate

The engagement rate is the percentage of people who interact with your website by staying for more than 10 seconds, clicking on something, or submitting a form. If you are familiar with bounce rate, engagement rate is the inverse of it.

The goal is to achieve a high engagement rate (60%-70% is decent), as a low engagement rate indicates that people considered the page unrelated to their search query and were not interested in learning more about what you had to offer.

A low engagement rate can negatively impact your SERP ranking; thus, it’s an important metric to consider when analyzing SEO effectiveness.

f. Backlinks 

Backlinks (links from other websites pointing to your own) are a proven ranking factor.

This means that acquiring high-quality backlinks can lead to higher search engine rankings and increased organic traffic. So it’s worth keeping track of them. Especially if they originate from reliable, respected sources.

Backlink Analytics will help you quickly identify new backlinks you’ve acquired.

Keep in mind that you might potentially lose backlinks. You should also keep a close eye on those cases.

Tracking the backlinks you’ve lost might help you identify which content needs enhancement. Alternatively, consider where to focus your link-building outreach initiatives.

g. Technical Site Health

If you’re already using third-party tools like SEMrush, you’ll have access to site audit data that can provide a technical site health rating. This score is derived from the number of technical SEO issues you have, such as missing meta descriptions, broken links, and duplicate title tags. Fixing these flaws can enhance a site’s SEO performance, making technical site health ratings a common metric to monitor.

There are several ways to measure your SEO performance, but these are a fantastic place to start if you’re new to it.

Conclusion

Having well-defined objectives and a clear plan of action for optimizing your website will make it easier to identify the key metrics to measure SEO performance. If you want assistance with either of these, please contact our staff.

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