KPIs in SEO – what to talk about with an SEO agency?

For many people, SEO is black magic. It is not uncommon for clients to not even know what to talk about with an SEO Agency and what to bill them based on. Here are a few indicators to determine the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. 

1. Visibility

Visibility is the number of keywords that appear in the top 3, top 10, or top 50. Tools that can help measure this indicator include Senuto, Ahrefs, or Semrush. 

Wanting to measure this KPI and decide on website positioning, it is necessary to clearly define the start date of the cooperation and the control moments for this indicator and thus verify its indications, for example, every six months or a year. Checking visibility at which intervals somewhat misses the point, since, according to a common maxim, Positioning is a complex and long-term process. 

2. Traffic

Measuring website traffic is made possible by a publicly available and free tool like Google Analytics. When measuring website traffic, you should focus on traffic in the organic search area. Therefore, remember that site traffic can come from various sources, not just SEO. 

When working with an agency, one can try to determine the estimated percentage and assumed increase in traffic over a given period of time. However, other factors affecting website traffic should also be kept in mind. Unlike visibility, website traffic can be affected, for example, by the current wealth of a potential customer’s wallet, the value of money, or various types of events in the geopolitical area. 

3. Views and clicks

Highlightings and clicks are metrics that we measure using the webmaster tool, which is Google Search Console. 

Measuring displays, it is important to know that in the case of organic results on a desktop, i.e. a computer, a display is counted when a user enters a search engine subpage on which there is a link to our site. The case is different for organic results in mobile preview. In this case, because the Google search engine, in mobile results, has gifted us with the so-called Infinity Scroll, or infinite scrolling, only at the moment of do scrolling to a specific search result the display is counted. 

It is also worth knowing that the aforementioned Infinity Scroll is beginning to characterize an increasing number of queries on desktop computers, as in the case of results on mobile devices. 

Displaying our results in Google search does not mean clicking and going to the website. Hence, working with an SEO agency, it is possible to measure clicks using Google Search Console. However, as with measuring website traffic, one should keep in mind the various factors that influence the actions taken by Internet users in the organic search area.  

4. CTR

CTR is a statement that determines how many Internet users and potential customers clicked on your organic result after it was displayed. Measuring this ratio allows you to verify the quality of your strategy involving metadata descriptions, namely meta title and meta description. 

5. Number of conversions

Conversions can be various types of actions on the site. Some of the most popular conversions include selling a product, filling out a contact form on the site, or clicking on a contact phone number that is on the site. 

To measure the conversion indicated in the previous sentence, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager combined with GA can be used.

6. Visibility for non-branded phrases

Brands that build their online visibility using various types of promotion channels first naturally acquire very high visibility and website traffic for branded phrases. This is where the space for SEO to increase awareness of a brand’s existence online using a channel that includes organic search results is born. 

7. Indexing errors

Whether a website’s SEO achieves its intended results also depends on the indexing errors that occur within the website. 

Google Search Console can be used to analyze possible errors. The tool Screaming Frog is also considered good for measuring this indicator. 

The main indexing errors that should be pointed out are: 

• 4XX errors
• 5XX errors
• invalid redirects 3XX
• duplicate URL addresses 
• subpages with noindex metatags

8. Backlinks

Another element that can be measured when working with an SEO Agency is the number of backlinks that lead to our website. Admittedly, nowadays, SEO is all about the quality of the link profile, not the sheer number of links leading to our site. Still, this indicator can also be used as much as possible to verify the SEO Agency’s fulfilment of certain work in the area of link-building. 

Summary

Before you start working with an SEO Agency, it is a good idea to determine which KPI you will be measuring in advance. Personally, taking into account the current rules of the Internet and the need to use multiple channels to achieve success, I recommend, in the area of SEO, talking to the Agency on the subject concerning the organic visibility of the site, as well as what impact it has on traffic to the site.