There are many metrics you can use to evaluate the success of your SEO efforts. Popular SEO KPIs include organic traffic, impressions, conversion events (or key events, as GA4 now calls them), number of keywords, keyword rankings, clicks, click-through rate, and average position, among others. If you’re unsure what these metrics mean or which ones matter most, this guide is for you.
In this article, I’ll walk through the most common SEO KPIs, highlighting which ones truly help measure SEO performance and which may just be vanity metrics.
Website Analytics Metrics
These metrics can be tracked for free using website analytics tools like Google Analytics, Matomo, Adobe Analytics, or Heap.
Organic Traffic
Organic Traffic is a measure of the number of visitors who come to your site by way of a search engine like Google or Bing (without you paying for an ad to appear in the search results).
It’s an important metric to track to tell you whether your SEO efforts are improving your website’s overall visibility and enticing searchers to click into your site. If your SEO-optimized content is meeting searchers’ needs and ranking in the top 10 for relevant keywords, you should see an increase in organic traffic. If your SEO efforts don’t lead to an increase in organic traffic, that’s an indication that something is wrong with either your SEO strategy or execution.
However, increasing organic traffic on its own should rarely be the goal of your SEO efforts. Traffic on its own won’t necessarily lead to sales, and there are a lot of SEO strategies that can help you maximize traffic but won’t help you grow your leads.
Conversion Events
Conversion events measure specific actions visitors take on your website that align with your business goals, such as form submissions, account sign-ups, or purchases. These actions are critical for assessing whether your SEO strategy is driving meaningful results.
For B2B SEO, form submissions are the holy grail of SEO KPIs. Tracking how users land on a thank-you page after a form submission can show the direct impact of SEO. A good SEO strategy should aim to increase these conversions.
Google Search Console Metrics
Google Search Console’s Performance report provides insights into how your site appears in search results. While these metrics are worth monitoring, they’re generally less valuable for B2B SEO compared to conversion-driven KPIs.
Impressions
Impressions reflect how often your website appears in search results. It’s called impressions because it’s measuring how many people scrolled past your website in the search results (or how many people it “made an impression on”). While somewhat useful for tracking whether your SEO efforts are increasing brand awareness, impressions aren’t a very useful metric for B2B SEO for several reasons:
- Impressions measure only how often your page appears in search results, not whether it drives meaningful engagement or results.
- It’s common for your page to in search results for irrelevant queries, especially as you start putting out more and more content. If your Accounting Services for Nonprofits website happens to show up somewhere in the SERP for organic baby food because you wrote an example about it in a blog post (like this one, lol), it’s unlikely that the person who was trying to find healthy options for their infant is going to switch gears and suddenly start researching accounting services.
- Some of those irrelevant keywords can have huge search volumes — in some cases, 10x, 20x or even 100x more than the typical keywords in your industry, which can drive up your impressions dramatically, while having no impact on your business.
Plus, there are also situations where improving the content on your site could actually result in fewer impressions. If you delete a lot of low-quality content from your site that was ranking for irrelevant, but high volume keywords and replace them with articles about highly relevant but low volume keywords, your overall impressions might go down, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
If your SEO agency emphasizes impressions during reporting, it could indicate they’re prioritizing volume over value.
Clicks
Clicks represent the number of times users clicked on your site from search results. While this metric indicates interest, it doesn’t show what users do after clicking. Did they read the first paragraph of your article and rage quit the page (also known as “bouncing” from your site, which can hurt your rankings if you have too high of a bounce rate)? Or did they read that whole article and then click on three other articles?
High clicks without engagement could point to poorly targeted content or suboptimal user experience.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is the percentage of users who clicked on your site after seeing it in search results. Monitoring CTR trends can help identify whether your page titles and meta descriptions are engaging. A growing CTR suggests your content is resonating with searchers, while a declining CTR might be a sign that you’re targeting the wrong keywords.
Average Position
Average position shows the average ranking of all the keywords your site ranks for within the top 100 search results. Lower numbers indicate better rankings, but this metric can fluctuate as you target new keywords or publish fresh content.
Let’s say your average position is 12 because you only rank for five keywords, and one of them ranks number 1 (it’s probably a branded keyword like your business name). You start publishing high quality blog posts that target totally new keywords, and within the first week after publishing them, you now rank somewhere in the 40s or 50s for eight new keywords.
Now you rank for 13 keywords, but your average position will probably drop into the 20s at least for a few weeks. Eventually, as you build more internal links to that article and more people find it, that rank should increase, and your average position should once again move in the right direction. The best way to use this metric is to evaluate trends over time rather than stress about short-term changes.
Keyword Tracking Metrics
These metrics typically require paid tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to track.
Organic Keywords
Organic keywords are all the search terms your site ranks for within the top 100 positions. While a growing number indicates broader visibility, many of these terms may be irrelevant. Focus on tracking keywords in the Top 20, Top 10, and Top 3, as these are most likely to drive traffic and conversions.
Rankings for Curated Keywords
Tracking specific high-value keywords relevant to your business provides deeper insights into your SEO performance. Tools like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker can monitor changes in rankings for your curated keyword list. Be cautious of automated metrics like “average position” for these lists, as adding new keywords can temporarily skew results.
Backlink Metrics
These metrics can also be tracked in Ahrefs of SEMrush.
Referring Domains / Backlinks
Referring domains counts the number of unique websites linking to yours, while backlinks counts the total number of links. So if there are two separate blog posts on the same domain that link to your site, that would show up as two backlinks, but one referring domain.
A strong backlink profile often correlates with higher rankings, particularly for competitive keywords. Gaining backlinks organically through high-quality content is ideal.
Domain Rating
Domain rating (DR) is a proprietary metric from tools like Ahrefs that estimates the strength of your backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. A brand new website with no backlinks will have a score of 0. YouTube has a score of 99.
While DR isn’t an official Google metric, it can help gauge how easily your site might rank. Lower DR sites may struggle to rank for competitive keywords without backlink-building efforts, while higher DR sites can focus more on content optimization.
Start Improving Your SEO Today By Tracking the Right KPIs
Tracking the right SEO KPIs is essential for measuring and improving your website’s performance. Metrics like conversion events and rankings for high-intent keywords provide valuable insights into how well your SEO efforts align with your business goals. By focusing on these meaningful metrics and avoiding vanity metrics like impressions or aggregate clicks, you can create a B2B SEO strategy that drives real results.
If you’re ready to turn your organic traffic into leads and want an expert to guide your strategy, I’d love to help. Get in touch today to start achieving your SEO goals!