SEO KPIs for 2023!

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Google updates its algorithm an estimated 500-600 times a year.

I still feel exactly like the kid above. Not because I don't care about these updates, but the reason is that Google has not changed the core principle of SEO for the longest period of time. 

So every update is about making the core of SEO stronger.

Let me state some quick facts about SEO straight-up:

• SEO is critical for the sustained growth of a business. You can't build & run your business on just ads.

• SEO is no magic. Spend time strategizing your SEO approach. You don't have to catch every search in your industry in Year 1

• Break your SEO approach into informational intent keywords & transaction intent keywords

• If done right, hyperlocal SEO can open a new search universe for you. See the difference between Zomato & Swiggy hyperlocal approach here.

• Product pages for Transaction intent keywords; Blogs for informational intent keywords

• Define KPIs (key performance indicators) of SEO before starting the project

Speaking of KPIs there are 12 most useful SEO KPIs for 2023.

I will give you a view of each one of them. Save this email, it will be your bible for SEO success tracking.

Tools used to measure these KPIs: Google analytics, Google search console, Google business profile &  SEMrush

1. Conversions (Sales and Leads)

The most important SEO KPI is organic conversions, whether they’re sales, leads, subscriptions, or any other action that makes money for your business.

Measuring and tracking organic conversions is the most straightforward way to demonstrate the success of your SEO efforts. After all, it’s easy to connect organic conversions to your SEO work.

As time goes on, it will be important to track not only the number of conversions but also the conversion rate as a percentage of your organic traffic.

This will allow you to analyze the efficiency of your SEO endeavors as traffic fluctuates.

How soon and how many conversions will you get also depends on the SEO approach you take. For example, if your strategy is skewed towards ranking for informational intent keywords, conversions will take time to kick in.

As time goes on, you will see the graph of the number of conversions going up. Conversions will be low in the first 3-months of starting your SEO project.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the newest iteration of Google Analytics, streamlines conversion tracking with events. Simply go to “Admin” > “Events” and mark your desired events as conversions to begin tracking.

2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a predictive measure of the total amount of profit you can expect to earn from a single customer over the course of their relationship with your business.

This is an extremely important KPI because it demonstrates the long-term value of each visitor you convert into a customer.

It also helps determine how and where to allocate your SEO investments.

For example, if you find that customers who purchase cheaper products actually end up earning you more over the course of their relationship with you, you may want to optimize your funnel to push visitors toward those products.

Tracking CLV as an SEO KPI will help you make better decisions regarding content creation, keyword targeting, and even conversion funnel optimization.

Customer lifetime value takes time to kick in as the customer will have to transact at least 2 times for you to measure it.

This is how the journey of CLV will look like:

The general formula to calculate CLV:

3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is a metric that measures the cost of acquiring one converting user.

SEO costs can include anything from team salaries, agency costs, and SEO tools to content production and link building.

CPA is an important KPI to track for your SEO campaigns because comparing it to CLV can shed light on potential inefficiencies in converting new customers.

A high CPA may be an indicator that you’re spending money on content that targets the wrong keywords or addresses a user base that is unlikely to convert.

You can calculate your CPA using the following formula:

Total Cost of SEO (agency costs, content, SEO tools, etc.) / Conversions = CPA

It’s essential to remember that SEO efforts and campaigns often take some time to have any noticeable impact.

4. Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) refers to the amount of money you get back from the money you invest.

A positive ROI is the ultimate goal of every SEO strategy.

It provides confirmation that the time and resources spent on content, site maintenance, outreach campaigns, and all your other SEO-related activities have been worth it.

However, ROI for SEO is difficult to measure.

Investment in SEO is straightforward, whether the money is invested in-house or in an agency, but it can take months or even years to see the returns.

For example, let’s say you outsourced a piece of content for $500. Then, you spent a few hours of your own time editing, uploading, and publishing that content, which amounted to $200 worth of work. 

Your total investment for this piece of content is $700.

If you calculated your ROI immediately upon publishing it, your ROI would be negative, as it hasn’t made any money yet. 

However, if you calculated your ROI again after giving it a chance to drive traffic and conversions over a six-month period, you might find that your piece of content drove $1,000 worth of conversions.

To calculate the ROI, you would subtract the initial cost of the investment ($700) from the total revenue generated ($1,000), leaving you with $300 in net profits. Then, divide that by the initial cost of the investment ($700).

This would give you a 42.8% ROI.

5. Organic Visibility

Organic visibility refers to how visible your brand is in organic search. It’s also sometimes called search visibility. 

Google Search Console can give you a rough overview of your organic visibility, showcasing your total number of impressions over a given time period. 

This is the perfect way to show continued growth in visibility, given that impressions show the searches that your site was visible for, even if those searches didn’t result in clicks. 

6. Organic Sessions

Growth in organic impressions and visibility should result in an increase in organic sessions.

This is where you can start to demonstrate the real impact of your SEO strategy.

Impressions result in traffic, and traffic turns into conversions. And that's when you'll start to notice an improvement in your SEO ROI.

You can measure Organic sessions in Google Analytics.

Navigate to Audience > Overview on your Google Analytics account. And select organic traffic from the top filter:

And you will see a filtered version of the overview report with Organic traffic stats only:

Remember, sessions should always be more than users, and the higher the mix of organic sessions you have for your website, the better it will be to drive sales.

7. Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic

Another key measure of improvement and success is a shift in the percentage split between branded and non-branded traffic that your site receives.

(Branded searches are the ones that have your brand name in the search query. For ex., 'Zomato offers' is a branded search term for Zomato).

Branded traffic is usually driven either by previous knowledge of a business or a recommendation from someone else. 

While that clearly means one marketing channel is working well, branded traffic isn’t necessarily an indication of the success of your SEO work.

So branded traffic is not typically used as an SEO KPI.

Non-branded traffic usually comprises people searching for keywords around the products or services you rank prominently for. 

In other words, traffic from searchers who probably weren’t familiar with your business before they saw you on Google.

I prefer using SEMrush to find branded vs non-branded search data.

You can easily find the split under the Organic research section. 

8. Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings work as an SEO KPI because they provide detailed insights into which keywords are driving your traffic and why.

Generally, increases in keyword rankings translate to more traffic and more business.

It’s important to stay informed of the keywords you rank well for, as well as the ones you don’t.

These insights can help you understand what you’re doing well with your content. And what you should be doing differently. 

Let’s look at an example of different keywords. On SEMrush, The “Positions” report in the Organic Research tool lets you see the keywords a page ranks for.

Looking at keyword position distribution will also help you understand where your keywords are placed in Google search ranking. You can find this report in the Domain overview report in SEMrush:

9. Google Business Profile Metrics

Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) is a free Google tool used to manage a business’s presence across Google.

If you’re a local business, you should be leveraging Google Business Profile.

Once you’ve set up your Google Business Profile, you’ll see several metrics tracked by default within the platform. Including searches, views, clicks, direction requests, and calls.

These are all extremely important metrics for a local business and should be tracked as SEO KPIs. 

10. Backlinks

This is how SEOs feel about broken links. Some of us have more broken links on our website than broken relationships, broken trust, broken hearts, broken....well let's just stick to the topic! 🥲

Backlinks refer to the hyperlinks on other websites that point to your website.

These links serve as “letters of recommendation” to Google about your site.

They are also one of Google’s top ranking factors.

You need to understand the current health of your link profile, especially compared to that of your competitors.

The link metrics you should measure include:

• Total number of backlinks

• Total number of referring domains

• Number of links lost

• Number of links earned

You can track all of these with Semrush’s Backlink Analytics and Backlink Audit tools.

Alone, these metrics don’t mean as much as they could, as you are not viewing the numbers in context.

You need to compare your own link profile to that of your closest competitors.

You can do this by running their domains through the tool.

As time passes, with backlinks, Quality >>>>> Quantity. Hence try to get backlinks from high-domain authority websites. Even if it comes at some cost.

Remember to link the most critical product/category pages while getting links from high-domain authority websites.

11. Organic CTR

Click-through rate (CTR) is not a confirmed, direct ranking factor. 

But here’s the reality:

The better your organic CTR, the more people are clicking on your listing on Google. And the more traffic you're driving to your pages.

You should be tracking CTR as a KPI, both at the page level and the query level. 

CTR is a simple metric that shows the percentage of people who click on your page after seeing it on the SERP—the higher you rank, the better.

Where organic CTR becomes really meaningful is in helping you determine how relevant your title tag and meta description (the elements that show on the SERPs) are in relation to a given query.

Again, this needs context, and the following chart illustrates the average CTR each position can expect to receive.

Compare your own CTR to the chart to quickly see whether you are outperforming the average or have work to do.

You can analyze the CTR of your own pages and queries in Google Search Console under the performance report.

12. User Engagement

User engagement metrics include data like bounce rate, average time on page, session duration, and pages per session. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who land on a page and then leave without taking any action.

It is a simple measure of whether your content engages those who land on the page.

It is also a great way to understand how relevant your page is to the search queries that it is ranking for.

A high bounce rate typically means that the page isn’t capturing the attention of users, meaning missed opportunities to turn traffic into conversions.

You can see the bounce rate of your site and pages in GA4 under “Reports” > “Engagement” > “Pages and screens.”

Average Engagement Time

The longer a user spends on your site, the more engaged they are.

And the more engaged someone is, the higher the chance they will convert.

So you need to be measuring the average engagement time and average engagement time per session for your site.

And consider ways to increase these two metrics if you see low durations.

You can track this in GA4 under “Reports” > “Engagement” > “Engagement overview.”

That's it for today, folks!

Hope you had some worthy takeaways from today's newsletter.

Like I said before, Save this email to master SEO end-to-end.

Next newsletter on Structures that matter- Google & Meta ads hitting your inbox real soon.

Cheers,

Apurv