Search Engine Optimization Key Performance Indicators

Search Engine Optimization Key Performance Indicators

It goes without saying that everyone with content on the web wants to achieve the best search engine results possible, but the question of how to track your progress can be difficult to unravel. The following document takes a look at various key performance indicators (KPIs) relative to search engine optimization (SEO).

Percent Change in Visits from Organic Search:
This is one of the most basic measures of establishing your SEO performance. All you’re looking at is your growth in search engine traffic. This simply shows your rate of improvement at its most fundamental level.

Percent Change in the Number of Organic Search Keywords:
This is the rate of growth for the number of keywords a search engine index has pointing to your domain.

Percent Change in the Number of Entry Pages:
As search engines index more pages on your site, the number of entry pages should also increase. This indicator will give you a sense of how well you site performs beyond the home page.

Brand to Non-Brand Mix:
The number of visitors arriving to your site via unbranded search divided by the number of visitors to your site arriving via branded search. This KPI will give you an indication of how well you are performing for long-tail, product specific searches, relative to branded search terms such as the name of your business.

Unique Pages:
Simply put, this is the number of pages on your site. In many cases this is somewhat difficult to determine since there will often be duplicate versions of the same page on your site (in which case it is important to establish a canonical page). Some sites will simply base this number on the number of products in their catalog, but it might be best to track the number of pages that have actually been crawled by search engines. Although this information can be difficult to track with many analytics programs it is worth knowing, particularly when it comes to calculating the next KPI.

Pages Yielding Traffic:
This is the percentage of the pages on your site that are pulling in traffic from search engines. The higher your percentage the better your site is optimized for unbranded, long-tail searches for specific products. A low percentage indicates that many pages on your site are not performing as well as they could. Ideal every page on your site should be visible to search engines and draw traffic for the keywords relative to the information on that page.

Keywords Per Page:
This number tells you how many keywords on a given traffic yielding page are active over the course of a month. In other words, how many different sets of keywords are entered into a search engine, resulting in traffic to that page? Although you don’t need to analyze this for every traffic yielding page on your site (unless this number is very low) it is important to look at the averages for all your pages yielding traffic.

Visitor Per Keyword:
This will tell you how much traffic you’re getting on average for each keyword on a given page. Again, you don’t need to calculate this number for every individual page, but rather you should look at the average for all pages yielding traffic.

Index to Crawl Ratio:
This number is a comparison of the number of pages crawled on your site to the number of pages indexed by a given search engine. The main purpose of following this number is to track changes in how search engines operate. When this number changes it is often an indication that something has changed in the search engines index.

Engine Performance:
This is the number of pages crawled by a given search engine compared to the amount of traffic from that engine. This will give you a sense of how efficiently each engine is performing for you.

Reprinted with express permisson from Sysiq.com.
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