The 7 SEO KPIs To Follow Absolutely For Your Natural Referencing
Monitoring the result of your natural referencing strategy is important to develop and improve it. Many actions are possible once you know the right performance indicators to follow. Find out which SEO KPIs to observe to analyze the effectiveness of your natural referencing strategy.
1 – Positioning Monitoring
This is the first SEO performance indicator that comes to mind. This is logical since the goal of SEO work is to position your pages on one or more important keywords for your business. The idea is of course to gain places to arrive on the first page of Google’s search results.
By following the progress of your positioning on your keywords, you will be able to analyze the effectiveness of the SEO techniques put in place. To track how your rankings have changed over time, you can use the SEMRush tool, an SEO benchmark.
Remember that the basis of a good SEO strategy is to choose your keywords well. If your position objectives are not achieved, it can also come from a bad choice of keyword, for example, a keyword that is too competitive. Bet on keywords with both good search volume and feasible positioning.
2 – The bounce rate, the number of page views, and the time spent on the site
The bounce rate is a good SEO KPI to know if your content is of interest to users. It allows you both to realize the quality of your content but also their relevance to your target.
The bounce rate occurs each time a user leaves your site without taking any action. For example, the Internet user closes the tab or types another URL in the search bar a few seconds after arriving.
A low bounce rate is therefore to be preferred! The bounce rate is often analyzed with a close indicator: the time spent on your site. The more time a user spends on your site, the more likely they are to be interested in your products, services, or content.
Conversely, a high bounce rate indicates that users are not finding what they are looking for on your site. If users leave your site too quickly, there can be several explanations:
- The site is not what they are looking for;
- The content is of low quality or not very readable… In any case, it does not make you want to explore your site further;
- The site is polluted with mass advertisements, pop-ups, etc. ;
- The user experience is poor: a site that is too slow to load, navigation between pages lacks fluidity, a visually unattractive site, etc.
A close indicator is also indicative of an Internet user who liked your content: the number of page views per session. The higher this number, the more interest the user has surfed your site.
Some solutions to improve these indicators:
- Offer quality content to users;
- Take care of your UX, etc.
3 – Page loading time
As we have just seen, the loading time of your pages influences the bounce rate. More generally, a site that loads too slowly is a bad point for the user experience. Today’s user has less and less patience to wait for the page to load… And above all, there is no risk of returning to the site!
To give you an idea, the ideal average time for a site to load should be around 1-2 seconds.
Several tools make it possible to follow the loading speed of which PageSpeed Insights. If you find that your site is too slow, here are some easy tips to implement:
- Compress images to make them lighter;
- Delete unnecessary elements (plugins, images, etc.).
4 – Generating leads and conversions
If the good referencing of your pages is the direct objective of an SEO strategy, its indirect objective is to allow you to sell more of your products.
Indeed, if your content is seen by thousands of users but they do not perform any other action on your site, then there is probably a problem!
In terms of conversion tracking, you have to define well in advance what you want the users of your site to do once they arrive on your site to adopt the right strategy.
Some examples of conversion objectives that can be set from Google Analytics:
- make a purchase,
- make a call,
- Request a demo,
- Fill out a contact form,
- Subscribe to the newsletter, etc.
How to boost your conversions?
- Insert frequent “calls-to-actions” into your pages to push users to action.
- Work on your texts to make them more persuasive.
- Visually highlight your products or services (pop-up window, colored insert, etc.).
- Simplify your forms.
5 – The number of visits and the share of organic traffic
Thanks to Google Analytics, you can see the volume of visitors to your site but also a more interesting indicator: the origin of your traffic. There are also different possible sources: “paid”, “referral”, “organic”, “direct” and “social”.
Thus, you will be able to measure the part occupied by organic traffic in your traffic. If the number of visitors coming to your site through organic search is steadily increasing, it shows that your SEO strategy is starting to pay off!
Another related indicator to watch: are the click-through rate on the SERPs page and the impression rate. If you observe a high impression rate of your pages, however, coupled with a low click rate, you may need to modify the meta-description or meta-title tags in the SERP to make them more attractive and encourage clicks.
6 – Backlinks
Backlinks or inbound links influence your SEO. Logically, your backlinks should increase as your site becomes more well-known and acquires some authority.
You can therefore follow performance indicators such as:
- The number of new backlinks obtained each month: if this number is too low, organize a net linking campaign.
- The quality of these backlinks: where do they come from? Are they relevant? Remember that Google prefers quality, diverse backlinks from trusted sites.
SEMRush can again help you analyze your backlinks.
7 – Technical SEO and crawl data
Your site must be easily accessible for Google robots otherwise what is all your work for? The more robots crawl your pages, the more chances you have that they will be indexed and therefore that your prospects and customers can find you on the search engine.
Thanks to the Google Search Console, you can access all technical SEO data in general. Check carefully and correct if necessary:
- The number of indexed pages,
- error pages,
- broken links,
- Accessibility on mobile,
- Page load times, etc.