19 essential SEO KPIs to track the performance of your web content

68% of B2C marketers in 2019 don’t know how to evaluate the performance and relevance of their content (CMI/MarketingProfs study). Yet producing content takes a lot of time and investment. To help you concretely measure the ROI of your content, we’re offering a guide on the SEO KPIs you absolutely must track.

What is an SEO KPI?

A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a metric that lets you evaluate how effective an action is at reaching a specific goal.

A KPI can take many forms: number of visitors to a website, average order value of an online store, number of downloads of a white paper, or number of clicks on a video. They are defined in relation to the goals to be achieved.

SEO KPIs: why are they essential to your web marketing strategy?

Determining the right SEO KPIs is essential to guide your strategy and define an action plan that is both relevant and realistic.

Well-defined KPIs let you evaluate the effectiveness of a strategy and take corrective action if needed. Presented as a dashboard, they let you quickly know whether your content is performing or not.

The Semji solution offers a complete dashboard to track your various content KPIs, whether they relate to traffic, conversions, the quality of your content optimization, or your productivity level.

Tracking traffic-related SEO KPIs

Quantity KPIs

Quantity KPIs let you monitor the growth of your audience on your website.

1. Traffic trends

What is it? This KPI groups together several metrics:

• Number of sessions: The number of sessions corresponds to the number of times a user accesses your website. So there can be several sessions for the same user.

• Number of users: The number of users who have accessed your website.

• New and returning visitors: the percentage of new users and users who have already visited your website.

• Traffic source: This KPI tells you which path users took to reach your site: organic traffic, a link from another site, social media, or typing the URL directly.

What for? Traffic-trend KPIs let you know the number of visits over a given period and see whether the share of users and sessions is increasing. You learn how your visitors mainly arrive on your site and to what extent your users reach your site through organic search. You can also notice whether your site attracts only new users or whether it also has returning users.

2. Impressions volume

**What is it?**The number of times the site appears in the SERP (results page) for a given query. This metric should be treated with caution: even if the link to the site is below the fold and the user hasn’t scrolled to the bottom of the page, some tools like Google Analytics still count an impression.

What for? By comparing it with click volume, this KPI lets you know whether the page is clearly visible in the SERP and whether it sparks users’ interest. The greater the gap between impression volume and click volume, the less visible the page is or the less it interests users.

3. Click volume

What is it? It’s the number of people who clicked on a SERP result leading to your website.

What for? Click volume gives a fairly precise view of the number of visits generated by organic search.

4. Click-through rate or CTR

What is it? The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. It is obtained by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions.

Why? This is an important performance metric and it’s very simple to analyze. If the click-through rate is low, it means the website’s SEO performance is not optimal. You’ll then need to look more closely at click and impression volumes to find out why. Example: A site has a high impression rate but low click volume.

The Semji edge: Reports, the module for tracking your KPIs

Connected to Google Analytics and Search Console, Semji’s Reports section brings together in a single place all the most important KPIs in content marketing.

Quality KPIs

Unlike the previous metrics, quality KPIs let you monitor the quality of your audience and thus know whether the site’s visitors truly match the targets of your strategy.

5. Bounce rate

What is it? Often abbreviated to BR, the bounce rate is one of the most important metrics of a website’s performance. It corresponds to the percentage of sessions in which users accessed only a single page and took no action.

What for? A very high bounce rate is rarely a good sign. This can nonetheless be nuanced by comparing the bounce rate to session duration. Indeed, in the case of blog articles, users may read the article and then leave the site directly. However, the content was in fact read. So it all depends on the type of content offered on the site.

6. Average session duration per page

What is it? Session duration corresponds to the average time users spend on your site. Time on page only takes a single URL into account.

What for? These metrics let you know whether users read your content and look for information on your site. This KPI must nonetheless be examined together with the bounce rate.

Also be careful, because average session duration is often calculated based on at least two page views. The information can therefore be skewed if the bounce rate is high. In that case, it’s more useful to look at the average time on strategic pages such as the homepage, offers, etc.

7. Pages per session

**What is it?**This is the ratio between the number of page views and the number of sessions.

**What for?**This KPI tells you whether visitors explore the site or not. If the number is low, you need to ask about the possible causes: accessibility, navigation, or usability issues, a lack of calls to action, an unqualified audience, etc.

Tracking SEO KPIs related to performance and conversion

Website performance KPIs

Performance KPIs let you evaluate a website’s technical performance. Search engines like Google make user experience an important ranking criterion. By tracking these KPIs, you can spot potential technical issues that may reduce your site’s visibility.

8. Page load time

What is it? This KPI indicates the loading speed of the page on a computer, but also on mobile.

**What for?**Load time has a direct impact on user experience and therefore on the site’s SEO. The longer the load time, for example due to images that are too heavy, the less likely Google is to recommend it in the SERPs.

9. Page indexing

What is it? This means checking that all the pages of your site are taken into account by search engines so that they can appear in the SERPs.

What for? A page that isn’t indexed can’t rank. This is a metric to take into account, especially when publishing new content.

Page relevance KPIs

Relevance KPIs let you evaluate whether the actions taken on the site truly match the expected goals: reaching a certain target, ranking for certain keywords, meeting your customers’ expectations, etc.

10. Page and keyword rankings

What is it? Page ranking indicates the average position of the page in the SERPs.

What for? This KPI should be distinguished from the website’s average position in the search results.

11. Internal linking

What is it? Internal linking consists of creating relevant links between pages on the same site.

What for? Internal linking is an essential component of SEO. It lets you indicate to search engines the common themes between pages and give them indications about the richness of the site’s content. For greater effectiveness, pages can also be organized into semantic cocoons.

12. External linking

What is it? This KPI indicates the links made in a page to external sites.

What for? Just like internal linking, external links let search engines evaluate the richness and interest of your content. Content that offers links to destination pages with similar or complementary themes will be valued more highly by Google.

The Semji edge: identify the links to include in your content

The Semji tool is an AI that helps you create content perfectly optimized for organic search. To integrate links into your content, the platform offers two features:

• The “Incoming Links”: Semji offers a list of pages from your website that it may be worthwhile to link to from the content you’re working on.

• The “Outgoing Links”: Semji indicates the ideal number of external links to add to your content.

13. Backlinks

What is it? These are the external links pointing to a page on your website.

What for? Backlinks are essential for gaining visibility. Indeed, search engine algorithms consider the presence of inbound links on a page as a mark of quality… at least if the site pointing to your page has a high trust score, or Trust Flow (TF). It’s therefore important to monitor them to know which sites point to your pages and to disavow low-quality links. To boost your SEO, you can also run link-building campaigns with sites that have a high TF.

14. Duplicate content

What is it? This metric lets you spot similar content across several web pages of the site.

What for? The presence of identical content on several pages of your site is a bad signal sent to Google. It’s therefore important to regularly check whether or not there is duplicate content on the site.

15. High-potential content

What is it? These are the pages where click volume is particularly high relative to impression volume, or the keywords used by the users who reach your site.

What for? Constantly monitoring your targets’ challenges, expectations, and behavior is essential to your web marketing strategy. This metric lets you identify themes and questions that interest your targets and that you haven’t yet, or have barely, addressed.

The Semji edge: spot traffic opportunities at a glance

Semji uses artificial intelligence to help you know which content to optimize first. Priority in Semji is defined based on a ratio of potential gains to effort required. So an article considered a priority by Semji is an article with an appealing potential for gains in clicks (or conversions) relative to the effort required (adding 200 words of text, for example, or including a few keywords in the headings).

Conversion KPIs

A conversion KPI lets you monitor the value of your audience and the ultimate relevance of your targeting.

16. Conversion volume

What is it? It’s the number of people who took a specific action (purchase, quote request, contact request, etc.) on your website.

What for? Conversion volume lets you see whether the strategy you’ve put in place matches your target’s expectations.

17. Revenue generated

What is it? As the name suggests, this is the revenue generated by an online store, for example.

What for? Especially relevant for online stores, revenue is a classic but essential KPI for evaluating a web marketing strategy. For a website aiming to generate leads, this KPI can be replaced by the number of contacts collected by the company.

18. Conversion rate

What is it? The conversion rate is obtained by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of interactions.

What for? It lets you judge how compelling your content and actions are. E.g.: for a newsletter, the interactions represent the people who clicked on the promotion and the conversions represent the people who placed an order after clicking on the link.

The Semji edge: visualize and track your conversion goals

The Semji tool now offers the ability to pull in the conversion goals previously defined in Google Analytics Universal, Google Analytics 4, AT Internet, and Matomo. No more navigating across several tools to know which content converts best. Thanks to this feature, you immediately evaluate the performance of your actions.

Check out our article to learn everything about tracking conversion goals on the Semji platform.

BONUS: Maximize your actions with a single KPI

19. A global KPI: the Content Score

Semji simplifies tracking your pages’ performance and helps you produce content optimized for organic traffic. Every piece of content analyzed by Semji displays a Content Score, that is, a global metric that evaluates the SEO performance of a piece of content at a given moment, relative to competitors in the top positions.

The Content Score is based on the analysis of several KPIs:

• The optimization level of the title
• The length of the text
• The presence of search intents in the content’s structure,
• Mentioning the main questions users ask about the topic,
• The coverage of the various subjects within the theme,
• Internal and external linking.

Request a free Semji demo to test your content’s Content Score! You’ll discover what improvements to make to boost their SEO performance 🚀!

Semji, Google Analytics… Which SEO tools should you use to track your KPIs and goals?

There are many SEO tools to track your KPIs, but they aren’t always easy to grasp. Google Analytics or Search Console, for example, may seem complex to use. Yet it’s essential to have an overall view of your content’s performance so you can adjust your efforts over the long term. That’s why Semji offers a simple, clear dashboard that brings together all your KPIs. This complete performance-tracking tool lets you analyze the performance of your content strategy in just a few clicks.