10 Key SEO KPIs and How to Track Them | Botify

10 Key SEO KPIs and How to Track Them

May 18, 2023
The Botify Team

Organic search performance has had a long reputation of being difficult to track. But in reality, it comprises many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that—when looked at together—can offer an understanding of various aspects of SEO success.

This blog looks at 10 of these KPIs that can be used to track benchmarks and variances in organic search results.

#1: Organic Visibility

Organic visibility measures how a website or web page appears in the non-paid search results of search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

This is one of the most essential KPIs for SEO success. It's directly related to your SEO efforts and reflects the overall growth of your business and paints an accurate picture of where your brand reach stands.

What does it mean for a website to have high organic visibility? In short, its pages rank high in search results across queries that include the keywords the company wants to rank for. Organic visibility is linked with increased traffic, higher click-through rates - and ultimately, more conversions and sales.

How can you positively impact organic visibility? Here are the key areas to work on:

#2: Organic traffic

When you have high organic visibility, it attracts organic traffic to your site, too. An increase in overall impressions drives more clicks, which in turn will drive up conversion rates. Organic traffic allows you to track the effectiveness of your non-paid efforts to attract visitors to your site.

How to measure organic traffic?

Botify offers three solutions to track organic traffic:

The results between these three data collection methods vary because the methods are different. Which one should you lean on? That all depends on what you want to show. For example: if you want to know your crawl budget? Use the logs. Looking to uncover keyword performance? Turn to GSC.

Botify's SiteCrawler allows you to review visits across logs and Google Analytics in a singular view:

If you're looking for GSC data, you can find that in Botify's RealKeywords view.

#3: Conversion rate

This is probably the most critical SEO KPI for any business. Organic conversions can come from sources like social media, newsletter sign-ups, or direct traffic, to name a few.

Looking to hike up conversion rates? It's not enough to just optimize the site for search engines; you need to focus on the user experience and provide value. Your website should be simple to navigate, provide useful information, and load quickly, too.

With Botify, you get a snapshot of your search performance in the SEO funnel found in the Analytics overview.

#4: Keyword ranking

Keyword ranking is critical in your quest for better SEO, increased traffic, clicks, and conversions. It's important to know which keywords you're ranking well for, and where you're falling short.

You can find these insights in Botify's RealKeywords, under 'Winning Data Dimensions' and 'Losing Data Dimensions'. The former displays well-performing keywords and the corresponding URLs on your site. The latter shows the opposite view, revealing pages that are falling short.

#5: Branded and non-branded traffic

Another key metric to track is the ratio of branded and non-branded traffic.

Branded traffic includes a variation of keywords that include brand. Non-branded traffic are keywords related to your brand but don't include your brand name directly.

To easily measure the split between branded and non-branded traffic, navigate to the RealKeywords section of Botify.

#6: Backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks from other sites that send users back to yours. Google views these links as "letters of recommendation" for your website, boosting credibility and authority in your area.

To evaluate the current backlink health against competitors, consider measuring:

#7: Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)

While click-through rate (CTR) is not an official SEO metric, it is still interesting to track because it is closely related to your SEO performance.

CTR = number of clicks / number of impressions

Looking for a holistic view of your organic click-through rates? Navigate to Botify's RealKeywords feature.

#8: Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of users arriving on a page of your site and leaving it without doing anything.

You can view your overall site or page bounce rate in Botify's SiteCrawler > Visits > Analysis > Quality.

#9: Average engagement time

It may seem obvious, but the more time a user spends on your site, the more engaged they are. To increase engagement time with site improvements, consider the following:

#10: Page load time

Website speed is one of the top five optimizations to improve SEO performance. To remedy this, consider the following options:

Increase your crawl budget and Improve your page load time.

At Botify, we recommend an average download time of less than 500 milliseconds. This is one of the main areas impacting your overall ranking, so it is worth paying attention to in your overall SEO strategy.