If you’ve already invested resources into creating and optimizing your content, you’re expecting to see the results soon and your wish is quite understandable. Provided you’ve done a good job, the results will be positive. However, will you be able to tell how successful your campaign is? The fact that it has yielded results doesn’t imply that you couldn’t have done much better.
So, to be able to see the whole picture and really understand how you’re performing, you need to analyze some KPIs. But which ones are the most important? There are many that you need to consider, but the following five are generally accepted as vital.
Organic traffic
Among those crucial KPIs, organic traffic is the first one you should look at. It tells you how many visitors your website has derived from organic search results, i.e. how many people landed on your website after using a search engine. This piece of information will help you see whether the first goal has been achieved – to bring more visitors to your website.
The more people you attract, the more you’ll improve your brand awareness and reach. Google Analytics lets you track your overall organic traffic to your website, as well as organic traffic to specific pages.
Page load time
Next, you need to look at the page load time. You may think it has little to do with SEO, but it does have a huge impact on the overall SEO performance. Namely, slow loading time makes people bounce, which directly affects your site’s ranking. If a lot of people bounce, Google will rank your site lower.
With people generally becoming more impatient, page loading time has become a very important indicator of your performance. If users have to wait for a long time for your website to load, they’ll bounce and create a negative first impression. Most likely, they won’t return.
Search ranking
It’s every company’s dream to make the content appear on the first page in Google, or at least on the first two pages. This is logical, since a better ranking means greater chances of getting broader reach, increase in traffic, leads and conversions.
A lot of factors, such as keyword competition, content relevancy, bounce rate, etc., impact your ranking, and they should all be taken into account. In Australia, for example, many companies are turning to professionals, such as this enthusiastic Sydney SEO team, to help them improve their rankings.
Pageviews per session
Next on the list of vital KPIs is the number of page views per session, which tells you the average number of pages a user visits on your website during one session. The more pages a user visits during a session, the more interested and engaged they are, which translates into better chances of conversion. Naturally, if your company has a one-page website, this information is not really revealing, and you should switch your focus on session duration instead.
On the other hand, companies boasting multi-level websites with complex conversion funnels can find this information valuable, since it tells them the value and relevance of the website and how easily users can navigate through it.
Bounce rate
The last KPI we’d like to mention is the bounce rate, which shows the ratio between the number of non-interactive sessions divided by the total number of sessions. To put it another way, it shows the percentage of users who exited the page without performing any further interaction with the website. It’s not uncommon that a lot of people visit a site, yet fail to interact, which leads to a high bounce rate.
Typically, the bounce rate varying between 20% and 70% is normal for most industries, but you need to check your industry’s benchmark to know how well you’re performing. If you have a bounce rate of over 90%, it probably means you are providing a bad UX or have slow page loading time, annoying pop-up ads, browser compatibility issues or low content relevancy.
Needless to say, these five are not the only KPIs you should be monitoring, but they have to be included in any list as a starting point for any detailed analysis. If you start revising your SEO strategy in 2021, you’ll get a head start for the following year and, hopefully, be able to stand out in this increasingly competitive business world.
