The SEO KPIs to Track to Manage Your Organic Performance
The right SEO KPIs connect visibility to business results. Here are the ones to track and how to read them.
· 1 min read
Measuring SEO is not just a matter of watching your position on a keyword. The right metrics connect visibility to concrete results for the business. Here is a selection by family.
1. Visibility (Google Search Console)
- Impressions: how many times your site appears in results.
- Clicks: the traffic Google actually sends.
- CTR: clicks divided by impressions. A low CTR on well-ranked pages signals a title or description that needs work.
- Average position: to be read with care, since it is an average over many queries and devices.
2. Traffic (Google Analytics)
- Sessions or users from organic search.
- Main landing pages: which pages attract organic traffic.
- Engagement rate: a measure of visit quality.
- Branded and non-branded traffic: the latter reflects your ability to attract new visitors who don't know you yet.
3. Business results
- Conversions from SEO: forms, calls, quote requests, sign-ups, purchases.
- Conversion rate of organic traffic.
- Revenue or lead value attributable to organic search.
These are the most important metrics: rising traffic with no conversions has no value for the business.
4. Technical health
- Indexed pages compared with the pages you want indexed.
- Crawl errors and server errors.
- Core Web Vitals: share of URLs in "good" status.
5. Authority
- Number of referring domains and their quality, rather than the raw number of links.
- New links earned per period.
6. For local SEO
- Calls, direction requests and website visits from the Google Business Profile.
- Number and average rating of reviews.
How to interpret them well
- Compare with the same period last year: seasonality distorts month-to-month comparisons.
- Set a baseline before launching actions.
- Segment by page type, topic and device.
- Don't limit yourself to a few keywords: track groups of queries.
- Be patient: SEO is measured over weeks and months, not a few days.
A monthly dashboard of five to ten metrics, tied to business goals, beats a report of fifty metrics that nobody reads.
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