SEO KPIs: The 6 Best Metrics for Your Business to Track

SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that show whether your search engine optimization (SEO) is earning visibility, clicks, and revenue. The six SEO KPIs worth tracking are search rankings, search visibility, organic click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, organic traffic, and conversion rate. Pair them with AI visibility metrics, because Google AI Overviews and AI assistants like ChatGPT answer many searches before anyone clicks.

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What are SEO KPIs?

SEO KPIs are specific metrics related to different components of your search engine marketing. These metrics provide you with information about your search rankings, your visibility in AI answers, the audience you’re reaching, and the way your SEO impacts your website.

You can find most KPIs for SEO by using a tool like Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), or Ahrefs. These tools will not only provide you with the essential SEO metrics but will also lay out your data in graphs and charts so you can view it in numerous ways.

Why should you track KPIs for SEO?

What is it that makes SEO KPIs so essential? Why track search metrics at all?

SEO metrics are vital to measuring the success of your SEO campaigns. If you don’t track your search marketing performance, you’ll never know the results you’re driving. That means you can’t reoptimize to improve your SEO.

By keeping up with KPIs, you can identify when a particular piece of content is failing to rank, attract clicks, or appear in AI answers. From there, you can improve that page to bring in more traffic.

What are the best SEO metrics to track?

There are many different KPIs for SEO, but not all of them are vital to your campaigns’ success. If you’re unsure which metrics are the most beneficial to track, don’t worry — we’ve laid out some of the best ones below.

Here are six search metrics to keep up with in your campaigns:

1. Search rankings
2. Search visibility
3. Organic click-through rate (CTR)
4. Bounce rate
5. Organic traffic
6. Conversion rate

1. Search rankings

The first SEO measurement you should take is also the most important: Search rankings. This KPI in SEO simply refers to how high your content is ranking in search results.

Naturally, this metric will vary depending on the page, search term, and day. You might have one page that’s ranking incredibly high for a given keyword on one day, but then a few days later, it drops significantly. Or, maybe a page ranks low for one keyword, but high for another.

Because of that variability, it’s important to continuously track your search rankings. Use a tool like Ahrefs or the Google Search Console performance report to see which keywords each page is ranking for. If you see a page that’s ranking low for its target keyword, take some time to reoptimize it.

To be clear, you should not track rankings by themselves. Having your site rank high in search results means nothing if those high rankings aren’t leading to other results like leads, conversions, and revenue. So, be sure you consider that context when tracking rankings, and track them alongside the other metrics below.

2. Search visibility

Another key SEO metric is search visibility. Search visibility refers to how many users see your pages in search results, including Google AI Overviews. Generally, higher rankings will lead to higher search visibility, but AI Overviews now sit above many of those results.

In WebFX’s study of 2.37 million U.S. keywords, 25.8% of queries showed a Google AI Overview (about 1 in 4 searches). For those queries, being cited in the AI Overview counts toward your visibility as much as your organic position does.

Bear in mind that just because people are seeing your content doesn’t mean they’re engaging with it. For that reason, pair search visibility with engagement metrics instead of treating it as a goal on its own.

Instead, search visibility is mainly useful when it comes to calculating other SEO measurements, like organic click-through rate (CTR).

3. Organic click-through rate (CTR)

Organic CTR is a measurement of how many people click on your content in search results. Google Search Console calculates it as clicks divided by impressions. But it’s not just the raw number of clicks you earn — rather, it’s your total clicks relative to your search visibility.

So, let’s say you want to find the CTR for a particular page on your site. If 15 people see that page in search results on a given day, that’s your visibility. Now let’s say three people click on the page.

The raw number of clicks in that scenario is three. But to find your CTR, you should divide that by your visibility — 15 — and multiply by 100 to get 20%. Notice that if your search visibility had been six, you’d still have had three total clicks, but your CTR would be 50% instead of 20%.

This is a valuable SEO measurement because it tells you whether your pages are driving clicks. If your pages have high search visibility but a low CTR, you might want to reoptimize your title tag and meta description to be more compelling.

4. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is slightly different from the other metrics on this list. For most of these metrics, the higher the number, the happier you are. But bounce rate is one KPI in SEO you want to stay low, because it reflects the percentage of people who abandon your site soon after arriving.

In GA4, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that weren’t engaged, which makes it the inverse of engagement rate. You can track either one, as long as you report it the same way every month.

Essentially, if 10 people visit your site but four of them leave after only a moment, you have a bounce rate of 40%. A high bounce rate indicates that your site isn’t doing a good job of holding users’ interest.

That might mean your title tag was misleading, or it might mean the page is badly designed. Whatever the case, you’ll want to spend some time identifying potential issues that may drive people away from your page and fix them.

Other times, bounce rate doesn’t indicate bad content, but actually shows that you provided exactly the answer users wanted in a short amount of time. However, you can still reoptimize to try and keep users moving to other pages on your site.

5. Organic traffic

One of the most vital search metrics to track is organic traffic. Organic traffic is a measurement of how many people visit your site after finding it in search results. It’s important to track so you can see how much of your traffic is coming from SEO, helping you determine how successful SEO is relative to your other strategies.

Bear in mind that organic traffic is different from the total amount of traffic on your website. Some of your site visitors might come from other places — maybe they click a link on another site or type your URL directly into the address bar.

Organic traffic, though, focuses solely on traffic coming in from search engines. That lets you easily see how much traffic you’re driving with your SEO efforts.

Visits from AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity usually land in referral traffic instead, and they’re worth isolating. In WebFX’s analysis of 2.3 billion sessions, visitors from generative AI platforms converted about 1.2x higher than organic search visitors. Set up AI assistants as their own channel in GA4 so you can see how much traffic and how many conversions your search content earns from AI answers.

6. Conversion rate

The final search metric on this list is conversion rate. Conversion rate, as the name implies, measures how much of your organic traffic ends up converting.

To find conversion rate, start by isolating your organic traffic. For instance, let’s say your organic traffic for a given day is 50 people.

Then look at how many of those people converted, such as by completing a form or call you’ve set up as a key event in GA4. For our example, let’s say there were five conversions.

From there, divide your conversions by your organic traffic and multiply by 100. In the above example, you’d have a conversion rate of 10%.

As you might expect, you want your conversion rate to be as high as possible. The more conversions you drive, the more revenue your business earns!

How do you measure SEO KPIs in AI search?

To measure SEO KPIs in AI search, add an AI counterpart to the core metrics above. Google AI Overviews and AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity answer many questions without a click, so rankings and organic traffic alone undercount how often searchers see your brand.

GA4 covers the last two rows. For the first three, teams use OmniSEO®, WebFX’s AI search visibility platform, to track how their brand appears for saved prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and to compare citations and mentions with up to five competitors.

Start with the prompts where you rank well organically but don’t show up in AI answers. Those pages already earn organic traffic, so updating them to answer the prompt directly is a practical first step.

Independent research from Clutch has named WebFX the top SEO company in the United States.

Clutch has personally interviewed more than 250 WebFX clients to discuss their experience partnering with us.

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Let WebFX help you optimize your SEO KPIs

Tracking your SEO KPIs is one thing, but reoptimizing your SEO to boost those metrics is another task altogether. If you want help with your SEO reoptimization, don’t worry — WebFX is here to help! With over 30 years of digital marketing experience, we’re the SEO experts.

When you partner with us for our SEO services, you’ll get help improving each of the metrics listed above and more. We’ll help boost your visibility and rankings, in search results and AI answers, and bring more organic traffic to your site, ultimately earning you more revenue.

To get started with us, just call 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!