16 Enterprise SEO Metrics To Inform Your Reporting

It is essential to measure SEO metrics in order to demonstrate the benefits of your optimizations.

The success of SEO lies in its ability to attract budget from current and potential clients, as well as executives. Justifying the spend on SEO to clients will keep them happy and encourage them to continue using your services.

There are many SEO platforms and point solutions available, and it is important to measure enterprise-level metrics to ensure that you are meeting business goals and objectives.

1. Organic Traffic

A successful SEO campaign is typically marked by an influx in organic website traffic.

This also applies to backlinks, citations, content marketing, technical SEO, and so on. The goal of the text is to improve domain authority, keyword rankings, or conversions. In order to measure or calculate your main KPIs, you will need to use organic traffic.

Google Analytics is the best way to measure organic traffic in a report. Although it is not a new concept, it is still the most successful way to bring traffic to a website. To measure your organic traffic, you will want to pull the following data from your GA account:

• Sessions — how often did users come to your website through search engines.
• Comparisons over time — compare your sessions week to week, month to month, and year to year.
• Landing pages — are the pages you worked on optimizing seeing an increase in sessions?

There is traffic-based data you can pull from GA, and you can segment it depending on how you want to measure the success of your SEO. You should at least look at these parts.

2. Engagement 

The next thing you need to do is look at how users actually interacted with your website once they arrived. This statistical data can help you determine if your website’s user experience is good enough to compete in the search engine results pages.

If users do not engage with your website, it does not matter how many backlinks or how good your technical SEO is. If people are leaving your site quickly without engaging with it, Google will show your site to searchers less often.

According to Google Analytics, engagement data can be found in the best place. You will want to focus on the following metrics for your organic traffic:

• Bounce rate — how many visitors left your website without viewing any other page.
• Avg. session duration — the average length of time that all your visitors browsed your website.
• Avg. pages per session — the average number of pages on your website that visitors viewed in their sessions.

A successful SEO campaign will lead to a decrease in your organic bounce rate over time.

This usually means that people like what they see when they come across your site. You also want to see an increase in your average session duration and a decrease in your pages per session.

3. Goals and Conversions

The type of business you have will dictate how you report on conversions and goals.

Some businesses are more focused on services than products. For these cases, it is important to give a report on leads, appointments, and so on. Car dealerships typically do not sell products until an appointment is booked.

In these cases, you want to pull the following from Google Analytics:

• Conversion rate — with increased traffic you also want to see an increase in the rate at which visitors convert.
• Conversion volumes — nothing sells success better than an increase in total conversion volumes.
• Conversion value — for when there is an average monetary value associated with appointments booked.

A “conversion” is defined differently for businesses with an e-commerce element on their website. These businesses will want to report on revenue generated through the website as a result of a SEO campaign:

• Total revenue — you want conversions to lead to higher revenue, not smaller and less valuable conversions
• Average order value — a higher average order value is another way to balance total conversions with valuable transactions.
• Return on investment (ROI) — you should be bringing in more total revenue than your total spend to generate that revenue.

As an SEO expert, you should be able to measure your client’s desired goal in your report.

4. Landing Pages

SEO campaigns are designed to improve traffic, rankings, or conversions on specific pages. The page that people are taken to when they click on your ad could be your home page, or it could be a specific landing page that you’ve built or optimized for your campaign.

Measuring success is important in order to determine how effective your landing page is. To demonstrate the effectiveness of your SEO campaign to your client, you will need to show metrics for the landing pages that relate to the type of SEO campaign they wanted.

Aside from organic traffic, these metrics include:

• Engagement — did you lower bounce rates, increase session durations on targeted landing pages?
• Conversions — did you generate more conversions through the target landing pages?
• Rankings — did you increase the search rankings of the targeted landing pages?
• Backlinks — did you build more backlinks for your targeted landing pages?

Although you may have had a hand in the success of a project, if you cannot show concrete evidence of the improvements you made, your clients may begin to doubt your contribution.

5. Rankings, Keywords and Search Visibility

It’s still important to measure your website’s keyword rankings or visibility in organic search, even if not all SEO campaigns will focus on that. This will provide evidence that your SEO efforts have had a positive effect.

There are two parts of this to include in your SEO report:

• Target keyword rankings
• Overall search visibility

This refers to the difference between the two. The first has to do with the quality of something, whereas the second has to do with the quantity. Both are important for any business.

The visibility of your client’s search results is important to show them that their brand is growing in awareness. This hand measures visibility in searches that are most relevant and important.

For example, let’s say your client sells running shoes.

More people searching for how to repair running shoes is good, but it won’t lead to more money being made. You need to show evidence that your company’s SEO practices have improved rankings and visibility for searches related to purchasing running shoes.

6. Link Metrics

They are essentially links from other websites back to yours, and they play a very important role in helping your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, backlinks are a key factor in helping your website rank higher in search engine results pages. Even though it may not always be the primary focus of your SEO strategy, it can still result in more links.

A great content marketing campaign should earn more backlinks organically, for example:

• Link growth — did the campaign lead to more backlinks over time?
• Domain authority — more links from relevant and quality domains should increase your client’s domain rating.
• New/lost domains — you should show more new linking domains gained over time than those that get lost.

These are all good signs that your on-page optimization or guest post outreach campaigns were effective. Even if your client’s main goal is more focused on traffic or revenue, it is still a good sign that your campaign is working if you see an improvement in the number of links and domains gained.

7. ROI

We live in a changed world due to COVID. Many brands are very careful about how much money they spend on marketing and make sure to monitor every dollar spent.

The best way to justify your existence as an SEO is to calculate the ROI. Start by identifying business goals. An ecommerce brand selling printers wanting to grow 30% year over year would need a strategy to achieve that goal.

In order to demonstrate your value to a client, you will need to know how they generate revenue so that you can show the return on investment of your work.

• Average order value.
• Conversion rates.
• Current rankings and traffic.
• SEO spend.

ROI can be determined by organic traffic, conversion rate, and average order value divided by the cost of SEO.

Calculate Keyword Value Equation For Ecommerce Website

Revenue is calculated by multiplying the search volume by the ranking position, click-through-rate, conversion rate, and average order value.

Equation For Lead Generation Website

Revenue is made up of the number of searches times the ranking position click-through rate times the conversion rate times the lead-to-customer rate times the customer lifetime value.

8. Brand vs. Non-Brand Visibility

It’s important to track how often your brand is appearing in search results compared to non-branded keywords, as well as how many conversions are coming from each. If your SEO platform has keyword-level tracking, this will be easy to do.

The majority of websites see a lot of traffic and conversions from searchers using the website’s name as a keyword.

You can generate more revenue for your client by helping them rank number one for branded keywords, as these keywords have more purchase intent.

If you want to know if your SEO strategies are effective, look at how many non-brand keywords are driving traffic. If you’re meeting your sales and revenue goals, that’s a good sign.