Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are part of any marketer’s dialogue, but sometimes this can go completely over a non-marketer’s head if they are hearing the term for the first time. However with that said, it still doesn’t mean you should avoid discussing with your clients or leadership. When discussing how your search engine optimization (SEO) is working, there are a few areas of importance to discuss how to better manage these. Of course, these aren’t all the different ways you can use analytics to break down your KPIs and how you are meeting or missing them, but it’s a good start if you’re just trying to get across a point and keep your efforts moving forward.

Traffic Volume

Understanding and monitoring where your website’s traffic comes from can help in a multitude of ways. Tracking this KPI will help you understand where people are coming to your website from, which will help marketers understand what types of content are pulling people in. This will also help understand if people are finding your company or services directly or from an organic search. Understanding if your email or social media campaigns are working will allow you to communicate to your business or client what is working, what is not and the best ways to make improvements.

It’s easy to communicate where traffic is coming from in order to understand where you should go next. If your traffic is fairly good from social media, but you find your company doesn’t have much organic search traction, you can suggest focusing more on raising your search engine results page (SERP) rankings by investing in more keywords, backlinking and site reconfiguration.

Use your analytics to understand where your website visitors are coming from, where they are going on your website, what content they are downloading and how long they are staying on your site.

 

Engagement

Understanding what content your website visitors are interacting with the most and the least can tell you a lot about how your SEO is working. To review how content is performing on your website, you must measure the amount of visitors, the number of sessions, duration on the page, bounce rate and more. Now, if you’re presenting this information to people outside of marketing, their eyes would already be glazed over. Give them the facts, with little embellishments and easily understood words and definitions.

  

From the above screenshot, we can see something has increased the amount of users and sessions on this website and decreased the bounce rate – all positives – and we can also see the session duration has decreased just a bit. All four of these analytics tell us the content shared for this site is helping increase website visits, but content on the website could be improved to keep visitors on the site longer.

With this data alone, we can surmise if the website content is improved and the company continues to share engaging posts with their followers on social media and email campaigning, their website visitors will spend more time on their site.

Onsite Content

This brings us to onsite content KPIs. It is so important for your website to be an information hub for your business and what you do. Creating content that flourishes with keywords provides informative and helpful information to visitors and gets your company’s message across can help immensely. This can be easily found by seeing what pages are visited the most and the least. The pages visited the most host your most important content – do not remove this content, but do make sure it’s up-to-date and still useful from time to time. The pages visited the least should be evaluated for necessity on the site and ways to improve content.

Perhaps your most frequently visited page is your Frequently Asked Questions page – that’s great! That means your website visitors are able to find answers to the questions they have rather than contacting your support team – saving you time and money! But, you will want to ensure that FAQ about your lead-time on projects or who to contact for IT questions is updated when business shifts or someone moves onto another opportunity.

Your biggest challenge will be finding the content that is not being used, discovering what the content issues are and making those changes to encourage visitors to, well, visit the content. You’ve worked really hard on that page and the last thing you want to do is completely start from scratch, but hey, sometimes it happens. Review your content, what its purpose is and how you can make it more intriguing. Maybe you just need to write a fresh blog on it and get it out to the Twitter-sphere. Or, maybe it’s a little more in-depth than that and you’ll need to restructure the page or pages and how they are found on the website. Whatever your issue is, discover it, be open to change and work to make improvements. Your SEO will improve with better content written for the specific SEO requirements.

This KPI can be difficult to present to non-marketers because it involves a lot of in-depth understanding of your content, something they may not be as familiar with, and that’s ok. Help them understand the flow of your website and why the content was created in the first place and how your SEO work can bring more eyeballs to that content. Make your SEO work for your content!

Audience Needs

Understanding an audience’s needs on your website is key to understanding how your SEO can work for you and them. Implementing a search engine on your website is a great way to follow exactly what people are looking for on your site, in their own words. This not only provides you with keywords to use for your SEO, but tells you what content needs to be the easiest to find on your site.

Monitoring what website visitors search can also help you create new content for your website based on their needs in real time. This can be content created specifically for your website pages or for your social media pages to link to.

Last Thoughts on KPIs for SEO

As you can see, there are many ways you can present your KPIs to educate clients and leadership on how your SEO plan is hitting its target (or not). Analyzing these initial KPIs will help your team understand where content can be strengthened, where you can focus your social media and email marketing to get the best engagement and what keywords you can consider moving forward. SEO is an ever-changing game that is important to stay ahead of in any industry. Keep an eye on your KPIs and your SEO campaign will be a success!