KPI, “key performance indicators”, provide a global view of your company’s activity. In SEO, several indicators exist to measure the performance of a website. Here are 11 SEO KPIs to follow and take into account for your website SEO.
1. Organic traffic
Measuring organic traffic forms the basis of SEO tracking. This KPI reflects the number of visits to your website from users who made a Google request and clicked on your site in organic search results. By definition, this figure does not include visits from clicks on Google Ads sponsored ads.
2. The number of pages viewed
Knowing how many pages of your website visit people who visit it is a good indicator of the interest in your content. Presumably, a user who visits several pages in a single session has a satisfactory experience of your website, but this figure should be taken in hindsight. On the one hand, it must be compared to the time spent by the Internet user on each page: do they visit several because they are interested or because they cannot find the information they are looking for? On the other hand, a user who only views one page during their visit may be completely satisfied and quickly find what they were looking for, which is far from a bad sign.
3. The conversion rate
With Google Analytics, set conversion goals such as selling products, downloading a white paper, or requesting a quote. By taking into account the conversion rate of visits from SEO, you have a global vision of what your investments in natural referencing bring you.
4. Fewer backlinks
Backlinks, in other words, inbound links to your website from outside sources, attract traffic and are a significant added value in the eyes of search engines. The number and quality of backlinks, namely the quality of the sources from which they come, is, therefore, an SEO KPI to follow closely. The Google algorithm gives a lot of importance to this data, and for good reason: the more a site is cited by other sites considered to be of good quality, the more it is considered credible by search engines.
5. With SEO technique
Your SEO can be affected due to technical issues such as broken links, missing tags, error pages, or duplicate content. To identify and correct these errors, several tools are at your disposal, including the Google Search Console, which will allow you to follow the evolution of your overall technical score and your various projects.
Keeping an eye on your technical SEO and reacting when something goes wrong is essential to improve and maintain the crawl ability of your website. That is to say, the ease with which your pages can be crawled and indexed by robots search engines.
6. Position tracking
Regularly monitoring the position of your pages allows you to react quickly if you notice a sudden loss of visibility on certain strategic keywords.
Tools like aHrefs, SE Ranking, or SEMRush make it possible to have effective and efficient position monitoring.
7. The bounce rate
Bounce rate tells you the percentage of Internet users who arrive on a web page and leave the site immediately. This KPI is of interest only if it is linked to the page to which it refers. Indeed, the bounce rate can be very high on an informative page containing little content and on which the Internet user would have instantly found an answer to his request. On the other hand, in long content or on a business page, a high bounce rate will alert you to the solution to a potential problem..
8. The average reading time
By analyzing the average reading time per page, you can judge the interest that your site visitors have in your content. So ask yourself: is the time spent by visitors on the website consistent with the content they are viewing? If this is not the case, you probably need to rethink the content of the site, or even change your marketing strategy in depth.
9. Research carried out on the site
The search tool of a website can provide valuable information on the expectations of Internet users. For example, on an e-commerce site, if you notice a large number of “promotion” requests, this probably means that the promotions are not highlighted enough.
This tool can allow you to have new ideas for keywords on which to position yourself. By placing you on keywords searched by Internet users on your site, you will better meet the expectations of your target and naturally increase your conversion rate.
10. The page load time
To improve the SEO of your website, it is important to pay attention to the page load times.
Too long a loading time will harm your SEO, and especially your brand image. A bad user experience never bodes well for SEO. It is therefore essential to offer the best experience to your audience through readable, complete web pages that load quickly.
On average, a site should be able to load in less than 3 seconds. Beyond 5 seconds, the loading of the pages of your site is much too slow. To speed up the loading time, you can play on several factors: compress images, remove plugins, change web host, etc.
11. Duplicate content
In SEO, we call duplicate content two content present on two distinct URLs that are identical or very similar. Whether it’s duplicate content internal to your website or between your website and another. There is a good chance that it will negatively impact your SEO. To hunt for intra-site duplicate content, we recommend using a tool such as SEO Spider from Screamingfrog. As for cross-site duplicate content, you can use Duplichecker, Copyscape, Grammarly, or simply search for portions of your texts in quotes in Google.
