Measuring your SEO is an essential step in knowing whether your SEO efforts are paying off. Without precise indicators, you are navigating blind and risk investing in ineffective levers. In this article, we review the essential SEO KPIs to track in order to steer your strategy, whether you are a beginner or an analytics expert.
Why define SEO KPIs to measure your SEO?
A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a measurable value that reflects the performance of your actions. In SEO, they help assess the health of your site, identify areas for improvement and justify your investments. Defining clear SEO KPIs from the outset helps you prioritise tasks: should you improve content, technical SEO or backlinks? The answer depends on your objectives and the data collected.
Common objectives include: increasing organic traffic, improving keyword rankings, strengthening domain authority or generating more leads. Each objective corresponds to specific SEO KPIs. Good SEO measurement therefore relies on consistency between your business goals and your indicators.
Traffic SEO KPIs: measuring SEO through audience
Organic traffic remains the most obvious indicator for judging SEO performance. In your analytics tool (Google Analytics, Matomo), monitor sessions from search engines. Regular or seasonal growth is the sign of healthy SEO.
Here are the sub-indicators to analyse as a priority:
- The number of organic sessions: overall volume of visits from Google, Bing or another search engine.
- New visitors versus returning visitors: a good balance indicates both acquisition and retention.
- Organic bounce rate: a high rate (above 70%) may signal a relevance or page load time problem.
- Pages per session and average duration: metrics that reveal visitor engagement.
Beware of artificial spikes: a viral article can distort the reading. Analyse trends over 3 to 6 months to obtain a reliable trend.
Technical SEO KPIs: what your analytics should reveal
Technical SEO is the foundation of any good search performance. Tools such as Google Search Console provide valuable data to measure SEO and indexing. Technical SEO KPIs include:
Indexing rate
This corresponds to the number of pages indexed by Google compared with the total number of pages on your site. A low rate indicates crawl problems, misconfigured noindex tags or duplicate content.
Core Web Vitals
These metrics (LCP, INP, CLS) measure loading speed and visual stability. An LCP above 2.5 seconds degrades user experience and your rankings. Regularly audit these SEO KPIs via PageSpeed Insights or third-party tools.
Technical errors
404 errors, redirect chains, misplaced canonical content: every error detected in your analytics should be fixed quickly. A technically healthy site maximises the effectiveness of your other marketing actions.
Rank tracking: keywords, SERPs and visibility
Rank tracking is undoubtedly the best-known SEO KPI: it involves monitoring the position of your keywords in Google's search results pages. However, a position is only worth something if it generates clicks. That is why you need to track "visibility" in the SERP, which weights position by search volume and estimated CTR.
- CTR (click-through rate): an average position of 5 with a 5% CTR may perform less well than a position of 8 with an 8% CTR. Analyse your high-potential pages.
- Long-tail keywords: they often account for more than 70% of traffic. Track their progress to diversify your acquisition.
- Overall average positions: a downward trend may indicate a loss of popularity or an algorithm update.
For precise tracking, use dedicated tools (SEMrush, Ahrefs, or solutions such as Piwik PRO). Set up alerts on key pages so you can react quickly in the event of a sudden drop. Rank tracking should be weekly, while other SEO KPIs can be analysed monthly.
Conversion SEO KPIs: the business impact of SEO
Generating traffic is one thing, but SEO must also contribute to business objectives. Conversion KPIs include organic conversion rate (number of conversions divided by the number of organic visitors), revenue attributed to the organic channel, and average basket value by source.
In your analytics, configure goals: form completed, purchase, newsletter sign-up, or quote request. A concrete example: an e-commerce site with 10,000 monthly organic visits and a 2% conversion rate makes 200 sales. By improving the content of product pages, this rate can rise to 2.5%, or 250 sales, without increasing traffic.
To easily link traffic and conversions, use the "Organic Search" channel segmentation in your measurement tool. You will then identify the most profitable pages and those that need copywriting or user experience optimisation.
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