After doing all the hard work, tracking your SEO performance is vital for fine-tuning your SEO strategy. The most important thing you need to be clear about is your SEO metrics. These are your SEO KPIs that can help you evaluate your SEO progress.
In this blog, you will learn how to track SEO performance as well as define your SEO metrics. Let’s get started.
SEO is a Long Term Process
The first thing you need to know is that SEO is a long-term process. It does not yield instant results like Google Ads. It needs consistent effort and resources till it starts showing results and after that, you need to give minimal effort and it will work on its own.
On average, it takes around 6 months for SEO to show results. Therefore, when starting to evaluate the SEO process, you need to keep this in mind.
When your SEO growth starts to tick off then it does not stop. It will continue to work even when you are working on it. That’s the main advantage of SEO.
So, let’s discuss what we need to know to evaluate SEO growth and check whether we are growing or not.
To evaluate SEO progress, you need to define some key performance indicators (KPIs). Fortunately, in SEO, KPIs are already well defined. All you need to do is to keep track of them. These are the metrics you should be reporting to your clients as well.
More importantly, all of them are provided by the search console. Those SEO KPIs are; keyword rankings, impressions, organic clicks, and Click Through Rate (CTR). Let’s define each of them.
1. Keyword Rankings
Keyword ranking is the respective ranking of the keywords which you are working on.
You need to maintain a file where you could keep track of your keyword rankings over regular intervals of time like monthly or after every 15 days.
This allows you to check whether your keyword rankings are indeed improving or not. There are also various automation tools that you can use to keep track of your keyword rankings like Semrush.
2. Organic Impressions
Organic impressions are a direct result of your keyword rankings. Every time a user comes across your website against some search query on search engine results pages, an impression is generated.
Your organic impressions should be improving over a period of time. Ideally, it should only increase and not decrease. If it is decreasing, it means that you are losing rankings on some of your keywords (tracked or not tracked). So, you need to keep track of impressions as well.
3. Organic Clicks
Organic clicks are clicks on your website on the search engine results page. These are one the important SEO reporting metrics.
This is also an important evaluation factor. Ideally, these should also increase but do not expect rapid growth on this. Over a long period of time, you can see growth but there is usually no immediate growth.
This is because organic clicks depend on other factors too which are beyond just rankings.
Some of those factors are your brand exposure, how attractive your titles are and the intention of the user searching for some information.
4. Click-Through Rate
CTR shows you the rate of people clicking on your website. It is obtained by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions for a certain period of time. CTR also helps you with monitoring SEO performance.
Your CTR won’t increase over a period of time. The only thing you need to make sure is that your CTR stays between standard values.
The standard values are between 2% to 3.5%. These are average standard values. Your CTR won’t likely increase over a period of time.
So these were basic and effective SEO KPIs that will help you evaluate your SEO growth and track your SEO results.
These numbers will indicate where your SEO efforts are going and are they even working or not. Next, we will talk about various resources to help you navigate the world of SEO. Let’s go ahead.
Search Engine Code Team is comprised of SEO experts and strategists having more than 20 years of combined experience. We keep testing and delivering knowledge of SEO for the community of SEO.
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