What KPIs and Metrics to Use to Measure SEO Success?

Not all marketers will succeed in SEO.

You can write the most engaging post or web page and promote it, but if you’re focusing on the wrong metrics (or worse, not tracking at all), your SEO campaign will go down the drain. 

This is where tracking your SEO performance metrics with an automated reporting tool comes in handy.

These reporting software tools boast easy-to-use templates with built-in metrics. 

You never have to worry about monitoring the wrong metrics that paint an inaccurate picture of your marketing strategy. Best of all, you can save hours of your time and create reports in a blink of an eye.

In this guide, we'll walk you through some of the most popular SEO performance metrics and how you can track them automatically.

• What are SEO Performance Metrics?
• How to Track SEO Performance Metrics?
• Top SEO Performance Metrics
• - Organic traffic
• - Keyword ranking
• - Click-through-rate (CTR)
• - Bounce rate
• - Domain authority (DA)
• - Number of backlinks
• Automate it!

Let's dig in.

What are SEO Performance Metrics?

Search engine optimization (SEO) metrics are goal-oriented data pointsthat analyze whether your SEO strategy is working.

These SEO performance metrics correlate with your key performance indicators (KPIs). In other words, they help you make smarter decisions in your digital marketing efforts.  

Note the Google Analytics dashboard below that displays the results of your recent SEO efforts.

Grab this Google Analytics report with your own data!

The conversions, traffic, and engagement metrics help you identify a specific page that generates the highest number of conversions.

Reports with key metrics like these help you understand user search patterns and search behavior nuances. 

How to Track SEO Performance Metrics?

If you’re one of the 17% of marketers who document their marketing strategy, then you’d know how important it is to track your campaigns. 

There are mainly two ways to measure SEO performance.

You can either use Google Analytics and similar tools to track your SEO KPIs manually using spreadsheets… which costs your hours of time. 

Or, you can automate your SEO reporting with a tracking tool like DashThis. Having worked with 18,000+ marketers that optimize a ridiculously high number of pages for multiple clients every day, we recommend the latter.

Connect your favorite SEO tools (e.g., Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush) and complete the remaining steps:  

1. Pick a pre-made template
2. Select your SEO performance metrics in Preset Widgets (note: all metrics are set up based on popularity)
3. Drag and drop them as you desire

Our automated reporting tool will proceed to bring all the data you need in one beautiful dashboard.

Click the SEO performance metrics (left) and automatically pull in relevant data in your report 

Customize your report for a personal touch. 

Distribute it to stakeholders with automatic report email dispatches or real-time access via a unique URL link.

Sign up for your free 15-day trial of DashThis today to pull all your marketing data in one automated report.

Top SEO Performance Metrics to Track

Organic traffic

Why track it: Improve online presence and number of high-quality leads

Organic traffic refers to searchers who landed on your site from search engines like Bing and Google. 

Typically, top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) posts attract a higher number of visitors and organic search traffic than bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) posts. Note that these high page views come at a price. The low buying intent in these ToFu posts leads to low conversions.

Keyword ranking

Why track it: Monitor profitable keywords and maintain top position

Keyword ranking refers to where your site ranks on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords.

The higher you rank, the more likely you are to attract clicks from searchers. This metric is often measured alongside keyword search volume. Tip: a search query with a large search volume doesn’t always translate into clicks. Take it with a grain of salt!

Click-through-rate (CTR)

Why track it: Boost rankings and traffic

The click-through-rate (CTR) refers to the number of clicks a post receives divided by the number of times it’s shown. 

CTR is a ranking factor. It matters in organic conversions and is frequently used in other marketing campaigns besides SEO. 

For example, an eCommerce social media marketer might review CTR in a Facebook ad. If they’re seeing a low conversion rate caused by different messaging in the landing pages and ad meta description, that could indicate a disjointed experience.

Bounce rate

Why track it: Identify user engagement and experience

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users that leave a website without completing an action. Review the exit pages metric for more context.

Often, a high bounce rate boils down to user experience (UX). 

Common culprits include poor site content and slow page load time. For the former, invest in customer research before creating content. As for the latter, analyze Google’s PageSpeed insights in Google Search Console (GSC) to dig deeper into your site speed and fix your crawl errors while you’re at it. 

Technical SEO plays a significant role in UX. Don’t ignore it.

Domain authority (DA)

Why track it: Gauge ranking potential

Domain authority refers to a ranking score (1-100) that measures how likely a website will rank in the SERPs. Page authority, another similar metric, measures how well a particular page will rank on search. 

The DA score isn’t a ranking factor on Google, but it is nonetheless one of the most important SEO metrics as it helps you gauge ranking potential.

Number of backlinks

Why track it: Increase rankings and traffic

Backlinks refer to links from a web page on one website to another. It’s frequently compared with referring domains, another SEO metric that refers to links from websites that your backlinks are coming from.

These inbound links are like street cred in content marketing. 

To increase the number of backlinks, focus on link building. Build links from reputable and relevant websites and avoid low-quality links like the plague!

Automate your reporting for SEO success

Whether you want to overtake competitors on the SERPs or increase the number of leads for the sales team, these SEO performance metrics will help determine how far along you are in hitting your goals. 

Grab this template to track your SEO performance metrics!

Now that you know which SEO performance metrics to track, create your first automated SEO report in seconds with DashThis.

DashThis is an automated marketing reporting tool that gathers data from your favorite sources into one beautiful dashboard. 

Sign up for your free 15-day trial today. 

Updated: June 2022. This post was originally written by Radomir Basta, CEO and lead SEO strategist at Four Dots inbound marketing agency and lecturer at the Digital Marketing Institute.