Businesses spend huge resources on making their website look beautiful. They even hire experts to get the best possible SEO services to achieve high SEO rankings. However, this effort slowly starts fading away as the website becomes old. Hence, in the initial few days, the website may appear on the first page of the search result, but shortly after, it begins to appear on the later. This is the story of most websites across the world.
Why does this happen?
The answer is simple. Businesses fail to put an SEO KPI (Key Performance Indicators) tracking system in place to constantly check their Optimization performance. So, if you are looking to improve or commence SEO for your business, then it is important that you not only look to have the best Rankiology SEO service but also have a robust SEO KPI tracking mechanism in place.
Simply put, SEO KPIs show the SEO health of a website. These KPIs should ideally be tracked at regular intervals and corrective action should be initiated wherever needed.
What are the top 10 KPIs that should be tracked to achieve higher SEO ranking?
- Organic Session: These are the number of visits originating from a Search Engine. A visitor usually searches for keywords or phrases on a Search Engine. Then the surfer clicks on the links they feel relevant to their search and land on that particular page. Organic Session is the most important KPI as it has a direct linkage between the efficiency of your SEO inputs and the results achieved. Organic Sessions could be influenced by the use of off-page and on-page optimization efforts.
- Keyword Ranking: This indicates the ranking of keywords optimized by you over various search engines like Google and Bing. Websites should always aim to achieve rank #1 or as close to it to appear higher on SERP. By default, brand names, domain names, location, or long-tail keywords that are specific to the products or services offered by you are ranked higher due to their uniqueness. Off-page and on-page optimization helps in improving keyword ranking.
- Leads & Conversions: Leads & Conversion helps to understand the user activity after landing on the website. Lead generation may be in the form of:
- Subscribing to the newsletter.
- Providing contact information for a callback.
- Webinar registration.
- Purchase of merchandise on the website.
Besides creating engaging UI/UX, websites can influence this KPI by:
- Making a navigation-friendly website.
- Giving prominence to activity buttons.
- Creating engaging content.
- Bounce Rate: While every visitor will eventually exit the website, it is important to track whether the user left immediately, or left after spending some time. The bounce rate indicates the percentage of sessions which were closed without performing any action. It is the ratio of non-activity sessions versus total sessions. A higher bounce rate impacts SERP rankings negatively. By auditing the high bounce rate pages and by conducting AB testing for different approaches, this KPI can be improved.
- Pages per Session: This is the measure of pages viewed by a user per session. The higher the number of pages, the more engaging is the website. This indicates the engagement ability of the website.
- Average Session Duration: This is the average time spent by users on the website. A website’s simple structure and engaging content have an immediate impact on this KPI.
- Page Load Times: In today’s world, the loading speed of website pages is critical. With decreasing patience levels of users, this KPI needs to be monitored diligently so as not to lose out any traffic before it even lands on the page. Lighter images, leaner code, and smart redirect links can impact this KPI positively.
- Exit Page: This is the last visited page by the user before exiting the website completely. Optimization is required if the existing page indicated by users is not the one that you intended.
- Crawl Errors: Googlebot and other crawlers can easily spot navigation flaws and reading errors in no time. Such errors occur either at the server level or the URL level and need to be fixed ASAP.
- Mobile Usability Report: The number of searches conducted on mobiles is rising very fast as compared to that of the desktop/laptop. Hence, it is imperative that businesses understand this trend and make their websites responsive and mobile user friendly. As the name suggests, this KPI measures the user experience.
The work of your SEO services partner does not end by simply designing a good looking website. It begins there. However, what is important is following these 10 important KPIs regularly such that not only are you able to maintain your SEO ranking, but are also able to improve it in the long run.