Since SEO is considered a cornerstone of digital marketing, SEO KPIs (key performance indicators) should always be prioritized. Too often, we fail to track our progress, but how else can we prove that the implemented SEO practices are successful and have tangible results? You may invest significant resources in your digital marketing strategy, but you’re doing something wrong if you aren’t tracking SEO KPIs. After all, SEO isn’t some type of sorcery with abstract results. By setting and assessing KPIs, you can measure and evaluate your SEO strategy’s effectiveness.
What Are SEO KPIs?
SEO KPIs are specific, measurable metrics that quantify the success of your search engine optimization efforts. Think of SEO KPIs as your digital marketing dashboard—providing clear signals about website performance, user behavior, and business outcomes directly attributable to your SEO activities. Measuring KPIs may mean putting in extra effort, but it’s fundamental for a thriving content marketing strategy.
Digital marketing, as well as SEO, is a never-ending job, and there will always be ways to enhance your strategy. The saying “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” truly exemplifies the importance of tracking the right SEO metrics. So, once you start monitoring key performance indicators, identifying improvement opportunities in your digital marketing activity becomes easier.
Do SEO KPIs Change Over the Time of Your Campaign?
Yes, the SEO KPIs to track will evolve as your campaign matures. In the early stages of your SEO campaign, you’ll want to focus on foundational metrics that indicate whether your initial optimization efforts are gaining traction. These early indicators help establish a baseline and show preliminary movement in search visibility.
As your campaign progresses beyond the initial phase, your focus should shift toward metrics demonstrating actual business impact and ROI. The metrics in month one will differ significantly from those in month six or twelve. Tracking the right KPIs at the right time prevents premature judgments about campaign effectiveness and enables data-driven optimizations.
What SEO KPIs Should You Track in the First 60-90 Days?
During the initial phase of your SEO campaign, focus on these foundational metrics that indicate your strategy is beginning to take effect:
Keyword Rankings
A keyword ranking KPI lets you know where you stand in search engine results pages (SERPs) for a specific keyword. In the early stages, monitoring keyword ranking improvements proves that your optimization efforts are working. Track both your primary target keywords and secondary long-tail variations to measure progress. While rankings aren’t the ultimate goal, they’re an essential leading indicator of future traffic growth.
Pro tip: Don’t just track average position—pay attention to ranking distribution and movement patterns across different keyword groups to identify which content optimization tactics are most effective.
Organic Traffic
An organic traffic KPI tells you how many people find you in SERPs and click through to your site. Even in the first 90 days, you should see gradual increases in organic sessions to your optimized pages. This metric validates that your keyword targeting strategy aligns with actual search demand. Segment this traffic by landing page and device type to identify specific areas gaining momentum.
Backlinks
Backlinks are hyperlinks from external websites that point to your site, serving as “votes of confidence” that search engines use to evaluate your site’s authority and relevance. Tracking new backlinks and referring domains during the initial campaign phase helps measure the effectiveness of your link-building initiatives. Focus on quality over quantity by monitoring domain authority metrics of new referring sites. A healthy backlink profile establishes the foundation for long-term ranking improvements.
Organic Impressions
Organic impressions represent the number of times your website appears in SERPs, regardless of whether users click on your listing. Before clicks increase, impressions typically rise as Google begins indexing and positioning your content. Monitoring impression growth in Google Search Console provides early signals that your website is gaining visibility for targeted terms, even before significant traffic increases.
Search Visibility
While similar to organic impressions, search visibility is a percentage-based metric that indicates how often your website appears in search results for your target keywords compared to the total possible opportunities. This composite metric measures your overall presence in search results for your tracked keywords. In the first 60-90 days, improvements in search visibility percentage indicate that your SEO foundation is strengthening, even if conversions haven’t yet increased significantly.
Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rates are one of the leading metrics used to measure SEO performance.
Early optimization of your meta titles and descriptions should yield improvements in click-through rates. Identifying pages with high impressions but low CTR offers quick optimization opportunities to drive more traffic without waiting for ranking improvements.
What SEO KPIs Should You Track in 4 Months Out and Beyond?
As your SEO campaign matures beyond the initial phase, shift your focus to these business-impact metrics that demonstrate real value:
Organic Conversions
Organic conversions occur when visitors from search engines complete desired actions on your website, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter. After the 4-month mark, conversion metrics should become your primary focus. Track conversion volume and conversion rate by landing page and traffic source to identify which SEO efforts are driving actual business results. This becomes one of the most critical SEO KPIs to track for demonstrating ROI.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing just one page without taking any further action. While not a perfect metric in isolation, tracking bounce rate changes over time helps evaluate content relevance and user engagement. Decreasing bounce rates on key landing pages indicate that your content better matches search intent as your campaign matures. Under Universal Analytics, a “good” bounce rate was considered 40%-60%. Now that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has replaced Universal Analytics, gauging a good bounce rate has become more nuanced. Different sites will have different bounce rate benchmarks, so it’s important to consider looking at a slightly lower percentage to determine a good bounce rate.
Average Time on Page
Average time on page measures how long, on average, visitors spend on a specific page before navigating elsewhere on your site or leaving entirely. This engagement metric helps validate content quality beyond the initial click. Rising average time on page suggests visitors find your content valuable and engaging—a signal that correlates with improved content relevance and potential for higher conversions.
Non-Branded Traffic
Non-branded traffic refers to visitors who find your website through search terms that don’t include your brand name, representing discovery by new potential customers. As your campaign matures, growth in non-branded organic traffic demonstrates that your SEO strategy is expanding your reach beyond existing brand awareness. This metric helps separate SEO success from increases in direct brand searches due to other marketing channels.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value is the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer account throughout their relationship with the company. Advanced SEO campaigns should track the CLV of customers acquired through organic search. This metric helps quantify the true long-term value of your SEO investments and can justify increased budgets for future optimization efforts. Of course, it takes time to gather historical data on your valued customers, which is why this is a good metric to track further down the road in your SEO marketing campaign.
Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI in SEO measures the financial return generated compared to the money invested in your search optimization efforts, typically expressed as a percentage. The ultimate long-term SEO KPI, ROI calculation requires tracking costs and revenue attributed to organic search. After several months, you should be able to demonstrate a tangible return on your SEO investment through this comprehensive business metric.
Track Your SEO KPIs with Cadence!
Are you eager to find out if all the hard work you’ve been putting into your SEO strategy is bringing results? Then CadenceSEO may be just the answer you’ve been searching for. As a full-service digital marketing agency and consultancy, CadenceSEO is here to help you take your SEO activity to the next level. Book a free consultation with our SEO experts today!
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https://www.cadenceseo.com/seo-marketing-consultant/
https://www.cadenceseo.com/digital-marketing/
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https://www.cadenceseo.com/seo-marketing-consultant/seo-content-creation/
https://www.cadenceseo.com/free-consultation/